The picture in the article is of a protected two way bike path. If the robot was in the car lane here, a driver could not pass in the bike path.

I could envision problems with unprotected bike lanes, but those are dangerous by design [1]. However, a robot clinging to the rightmost side of a car lane next to an unprotected bike lane could easily make passing in the unprotected bike lane infeasible.

But, this is all just speculation.

[1] https://usa.streetsblog.org/2019/05/29/protect-yourself-sepa...