The · Mousehole

I was surprised that all of the robots successfully reached their destinations, but clearly that success (and people's positive reactions) is due to several cues:
1: Anthopomorphism - even a crude humanoid shape helps. The smiley face would have helped a lot more.
2: Cuteness / Harmlessness / Helplessness - the small size and obvious fragility both hook into nurturing instincts, evolved to protect small children, and these days generalised to pets.
3: Lack of monetary value - If they were Shiny Metal robots with lots of pretty Blinkenlights, I bet at least one would've been stolen, even if they were hitting cues 1 and 2 hard.

As for the man's reaction, my vote's for the 'reflexive' explanation. Your talking to pets analogy is spot-on. Another generalisation of a reaction originally evolved for infants.

The article was so cute. But it's ironic how ppl will help a robot but won't help a human the same way xD I bet that if I was lost in such a big city it would be more difficult to find somebody to help me than this robot :/

As for not getting help in a big city, sometimes you can get help when you're not even asking for it. When I was in London last I was walking around town, seeing the sights. I'd paused to take a quick look at a map. I wasn't worried at all, just estimating how long it'd take me to walk to where I was going, when this terribly nice bloke spotted me looking at the map and asked if I was lost and could he tell me how to get to where I wanted to go? Really couldn't be nicer, and not at all in a creepy stalkery way.

And people were similarly helpful on the New York subway, when I actually was lost.

Yeah, there are some right bastards out there. But they're not in the majority, not even in the biggest cities in the world. If they were, the cities would collapse.