Robot collision at Ocado warehouse near London sparks fire, delaying customer orders

The online-only UK grocer said no one was injured and damage was limited.

Online-only British supermarket Ocado has had to cancel some customers’ delivery orders after a Friday robot collision at one of its warehouses caused a fire, the company said.

The fire at the company’s Erith warehouse east of London “appears to have been caused by the collision of three bots on the grid,” the company said in a statement on Sunday. No one was injured, and the damage was limited to less than 1 percent of its grid, according to Ocado.

The grocer’s warehouses are populated with washing machine-sized robots that move products around on a grid system. The Verge’s James Vincent wrote about Ocado’s plans in a 2018 feature story. He described the process …