Deliveroo starts Coco pavement robot deliveries in Canary Wharf, the first of five UK towns

A lunch order from Patty and Bun, Signorelli or Beam in Wood Wharf can now go out on a four-wheeled electric robot moving at walking pace ^[6][5]. It finds its way with cameras, sensors and AI, according to TechRadar ^[5]. The staff packing those bags will hand some to a machine and the rest to a rider. Deliveroo says most orders will still go to riders ^[2]. It has not said what share the robots will take, or by when ^[3].

For the people at the counter, the split matters more than the town count. A majority for riders can be any figure above half ^[2]. A restaurant manager's rota and a rider's choice of area both depend on the actual split. Deliveroo has announced five locations ^[1]. This month it starts in one district with a handful of merchants, with Milton Keynes, Leeds, Stockton on Tees and Nottingham to follow in the coming weeks and months ^[6][4].

Milton Keynes is where users have already shown what they do. Starship has run pavement robots there since April 2018, with Co-op and Tesco ^[7]. Starship says it has made nine million deliveries from 270 locations across seven countries ^[8]. That works out to roughly 33,000 per location over the life of the service ^[15]. The figure is a lifetime total and does not show how many households order a second time. Still, after eight years ^[9], people in Milton Keynes are used to robots on their pavements. What changes there is who dispatches them: Starship's partners were grocers, and now a delivery platform will choose between robot and rider ^[1][7].

The ownership suggests who the deal suits first. Deliveroo has belonged to DoorDash since October 2025, and DoorDash already uses Coco robots in Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami and Washington ^[10]. Until now Coco has worked in just one European city, Helsinki ^[11], so Canary Wharf is its first European deployment outside Finland's capital ^[16]. For DoorDash, the UK extends an arrangement it already runs in four US cities ^[10]. For a Wood Wharf merchant, it starts as a test with a few neighbours ^[6].

Deliveroo is not the first company to promise riders they will keep their work. In June, JD.com's founder said robots would take his couriers' jobs eventually, and in the same breath promised that nobody would be fired ^[13]. There are 700,000 of those couriers ^[13]. Deliveroo will set its robot share inside its own dispatch ^[2][3]. In China, dispatch is now open to negotiation. In April the state told delivery apps they could no longer push orders to drivers who were worn out, and it opened the dispatch algorithm to union bargaining, a change covering more than 200 million workers ^[14].

If you are one of the early merchants, I'd take the robot orders on one condition: get the share for your site in writing. The tradeoff is that you are testing on paying customers with a split you cannot see until Deliveroo publishes it ^[3].

The first question is whether you know what share of your orders goes to robots. The second is whether you can see delivery times and refunds broken out by robot and rider. If you have both, staff and price around the robot. If you know the share but get no breakdown, you are trusting the platform's numbers. A breakdown without the share lets you learn from the orders, but you still cannot set a rota. If you have neither, you cannot set a rota or check the platform's numbers. Going by what Deliveroo has said so far, every merchant starts in one of the last two cases ^[3].