RobotRisk Autonomous Systems Incident & Risk Register
RobotRisk / Kiwibot / 2018-12

Kiwi delivery robot catches fire at UC Berkeley from defective replacement battery

S3 · 12/2018 · Kiwibot · Berkeley, CA, USA

Record

CompanyKiwibot
Categorysidewalk delivery
Typefire
Date12/2018
Time of daynot documented
LocationBerkeley, CA, USA · UC Berkeley
SeverityS3 (recall, enforcement, or fleet-wide fault)
Scale1 robot; fleet of ~100 grounded pending investigation
Confidencehigh
VerificationCited source on file; not independently re-verified
SourceTechCrunch

What happened

A Kiwi (Kiwibot) delivery robot burst into flames on a sidewalk near UC Berkeley's MLK Student Union due to thermal runaway in a defective replacement battery installed by an employee; bystander used a fire extinguisher and the company temporarily pulled its ~100-robot fleet to investigate.

Kiwibot record context

Kiwibot vs sidewalk delivery alternatives

sidewalk delivery context

sidewalk delivery: entries by year

252018 S3: 11182023 S3: 11232024 S2: 11242025 S2: 22025 S4: 13252026 S1: 32026 S2: 2526
S1S2S3S4S5

sidewalk delivery: failure modes

sidewalk delivery: most entries

fire context

fire: by category

fire: by year

fire: severity profile

Other Kiwibot entries

Also from Critical Systems Analysis: CSA - functional safety engineering · Company directory · FSTalent - functional safety jobs