Robots are machines and machines can sometimes malfunction. What’s not as normal is when they spontaneously combust. That’s what happened to an autonomous delivery robot on a Berkeley, California walkway over the weekend. The fire was put out by a passerby before the city’s fire department arrived on the scene and sprayed down the machine with foam. The robots are made by a delivery startup called Kiwi which confirmed in a statement that no one was harmed by its robot catching fire.
These robots, called KiwiBots, are only available in Berkeley currently. They have been built to cover the last 300 meters of food deliveries. The service was launched in 2017 and has made over 10,000 deliveries as of May this year.
While the company mentioned in its statement that the incident caused “some smoke and minor flames” but video captured at the scene shows that the robot completely caught fire and it burnt fiercely in a way that you’d normally see a battery fire.
Kiwi believes that the fire is the result of a human error as a faulty battery might have been inserted into the machine. The startup’s service remained suspended until it completed the investigation. It has now created new software which will “rigorously monitor the state of each battery” to ensure that something like this doesn’t happen again.
Filed in .. Source: theverge