Penn Professor Emeritus, 78, Arrested Blocking Delivery Robot

A 78-year-old retired University of Pennsylvania professor was cited for disorderly conduct in Center City Philadelphia after refusing to step out of the path of an Uber Eats delivery robot.

Carolyn Marvin, professor emeritus at Penn's Annenberg School of Communication, was leaving a flu shot appointment near Reading Terminal Market around 1:16 p.m. on October 14 when she blocked the four-wheeled machine on the 1200 block of Filbert Street, CNN reported. Police said they responded to a report of "criminal mischief involving a robot" and gave her "multiple commands" to move before issuing the citation.

She intends to keep going. "I know they're taking the jobs of human delivery workers and so, I have been protesting them whenever I saw them by standing in front of them and preventing them from going forward," she told Philly Voice. She plans to contest the ticket on First Amendment grounds: "I think it's my First Amendment right to publicly demonstrate on a sidewalk to protest against delivery robots."

The underlying legal picture is less tidy than the standoff. Pennsylvania's vehicle code classifies personal delivery devices as pedestrians, but, as Fox News reported, the devices "must yield the right-of-way or safely navigate around pedestrians." The classification does not grant them priority over humans. Uber Eats runs the service with robotics firm Avride; it launched in Philadelphia in March 2026, and the machines travel up to 5 mph and carry up to 55 pounds.

Marvin says she will keep standing in their way when she has the time. The protest, she said, "allows me to talk to people about what's going on." Among the 179 robotics stories we have logged over the past 90 days, most are hardware launches or funding rounds; public pushback on a sidewalk is a much thinner slice.