Incident 126: Three Robots Collided, Sparking Fire in a Grocer's Warehouse in UK

Description: A collision involving three robots at an Ocado's warehouse in Erith, UK, resulting in a fire but no reports of injuries.

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Alleged: Ocado developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Ocado.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
126
Report Count
4
Incident Date
2021-07-16
Editors
Sean McGregor, Khoa Lam
Major fire breaks out at Ocado warehouse after three robots collide
independent.co.uk · 2021

Ocado has apologised to customers for cancelling their orders after a major warehouse fire broke out when three robots collided.

Around 100 firefighters and 15 fire engines tackled the blaze at the three-storey depot in Erith, south London,…

A robot collision sparked a fire at the UK's top online grocer
engadget.com · 2021

Robots are credited with boosting efficiency in some industrial use cases. But, as a major UK grocery service just found out, that doesn't mean they're not accident-prone like humans. Ocado — which competes with Amazon Fresh — has been forc…

Robots Collide, Causing Fire at Online-Only Grocer in UK
pcmag.com · 2021

Ocado had to cancel orders and shut down the facility for a few days.

Robots may be the future of order fulfillment (and cleaning and gardening), but there's still a long way to go before it's completely safe to rely on them. Online grocer …

Robot Collision Sets London Warehouse Ablaze, Delays Orders
extremetech.com · 2021

Online-only grocer Ocado was forced to cancel some customers’ orders last week following a fire at its London warehouse. This marks the second fire Ocado has experienced at one of its warehouses; this time, a three-robot collision is to bla…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.

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