A Preemptive Pilot: Examining a City’s Attempt to Manage Autonomous Delivery Robots through a Real-world Deployment

Over the past several years, logistics companies and robotics startups have increasingly deployed autonomous delivery robots in cities through real-world pilot programs. This paper examines a publicly administered pilot in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where municipal officials partnered with a robotics company to evaluate autonomous delivery robots in public space. Drawing on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork, it shows how opportunities for public participation coexisted with limited capacity to influence the pilot’s trajectory, even as residents negotiated its legitimacy through public meetings, everyday encounters, and informal acts of resistance. Such pilots are not merely trials but performative interventions. I introduce the concept of preemptive pilots to describe this mode of anticipatory governance. Preemptive pilots stage possible futures, bound what becomes politically imaginable, and ultimately function as mechanisms of power that shape long-term governance and demand greater public accountability.