What about small wheeled robots like this moving by sidewalks? [1] Unlike drones, they don't fall on people's head. And kids love to play with them by blocking their way and seeing how they try to find another way.
Their platform is exactly like this, maybe bigger and faster. Nowhere near thousands of pounds, and is way more efficient than an aerial drone. (also it seems they saw random people riding Yandex robots and made theirs inconvenient to ride)
these things are such a nuisance on sidewalks. i wish cities would prevent the rollout of new commercial automated vehicles that make it harder for real people to make use of existing pedestrian infrastructure.
Maybe the sidewalks should be wider? I agree that in historical part of the city they can be pretty narrow (can be fixed by narrowing or removing the car lanes though), but in 20th century (Soviet) developed areas the sidewalks are pretty wide, they can be like 10 meters (30 feet) wide on large streets or more.
They could also use bicycle lanes, but cyclists won't like it.
The problem is it all needs to grow with use and buildings aren't very mobile. You build something with plenty of road/sidewalk at the edge of the city, city grows, traffic increases, land gets expensive so the buildings get as big as possible and split into smaller apartments, street and sidewalk need to grow, there's nowhere to grow, street eats some of the sidewalk since it's more 'necessary'/utilitarian as pedestrians deal with congestion better than cars and western governments are allergic to motorcycles/scooters. Eventually as a middle point a bicycle lane might sprout since it's kind of the mid point of utility and leisure.
But you can't make things obscenely large in the beginning since then if the area doesn't take off you have a huge amount of infrastructure that still needs maintenance and it also feels like a ghost town with less usage.
It was all a lot easier in the 20th century because there wasn't this mix of speed/capability. The cars were shit, horse carriages aren't exactly fast, bicycles were shit... You had | 20hp trabantesque cars - 5hp horse carriage - bicycle - pedestrian |. Now you have | 400 hp cars - faster (e)bicycles - pedestrians | combined with increased safety culture so you need more splittage and more barriers (be it trees, an actual barrier, curvy roads built to slow people down, etc)
Have you ever seen one? Because the ones I have seen IRL doing deliveries where especially lost in open spaces. They do not make sense how they are moving and its not that obvious where its going. Like a goose on the side-walk: you need to be vary because you cannot really determine what it will do next. But in theory, they should work great ...
Drones don't just "fall on people's head[s]". Zipline, the only US-approved BVLOS drone operator I know of besides maybe Google's Wing, had to show the FAA millions of accident-free flight miles they did overseas in other countries, in order to get regulatory approval.
One major difference with Zipline versus others is the use of fixed wing craft (in addition to providing critical supplies in areas that are otherwise challenging). The failure mode for fixed wing or even helicopters in the air is way less catastrophic than quadcopters. People like quads because all the DJI stuff that makes it easy, but they're also both by far the least energy and capacity inefficient and most dangerous if there's an issue that causes lift to stop. Given how much people already shit themselves about GA aircraft and recreational RC aircraft, as well as the problems above, I have my doubts about delivery drones becoming a big thing for things like food.
Zipline's platform 2 is VTOL and is essentially a quad rotor + 1 rear swivel motor, during delivery. A fixed wing won't help you much if you have a failure while hovering. Google's Wing is a very similar design (6 hover motors on a boom, two booms, one along each wing). The key is flight system redundancies, something consumer drones simply don't have, and Zipline also has a ballistic parachute in case of severe failures since their aircraft is fairly large.
Maybe they won't ever become a "big thing", but Zipline is already delivering food directly to consumers in TX and elsewhere.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/85/Ya...