Delivery robot bounces spontaneously in flames in California
An autonomous food delivery robot burst into flames on a Berkeley, California walkway Friday, as reported by The Daily Californian . Kiwi, the startup that creates and controls the hundred strong robotic fleet, issued a statement that the fire was quickly turned off by a passerby before the city's fire department arrived and doused the machine in foam. No one was injured as a result of the incident.
The Kiwi suspended its service until it was able to complete its investigation. It said that it believed that the fire was caused by human error, as a wrong battery was manually inserted into the robot, thus causing thermal failure ̵[ads1]1; the same problem that resulted in the recall of Samsung Galaxy Note 7 phones. Kiwi says that a new piece of software will "carefully monitor the condition of each battery" to prevent something like this happening again.
Kiwi said the incident resulted in "a little smoke and less flames". But video taken by the event shows the robot engrossed in the kind of burning fireball that is usually associated with battery fibrillators.
KiwiBots is currently only available in Berkeley, and is designed to handle the last 300 meters of food deliveries. The kiwi delivery process costs $ 3.80 and is formed of three different parts. First, a robot carries a row of food from a restaurant counter to the street, where it is then picked up by a courier on a tricycle. This courier then takes food delivery to a few hundred meters of the destination, before a KiwiBot is used to take it directly to a person's door. The service was launched in 2017, and in May this year it had made over 10,000 such deliveries with an average delivery time of 27 minutes, according to the company.
The event comes at a critical time for the coming robot delivery industry. Several companies, including Starship, and newer Postmates, have either announced or already started testing their autonomous delivery service. However, at least one city, San Francisco, has violated the use of these machines by claiming that they have permissions and restrict their use to less crowded areas in the city. Photos of Kiwi's flaming robot in a public space are unlikely to reduce these concerns.
