The MachineRecord
Incident register for commercial robotics

Every incident
Every consequence

We keep a case per event, not a record per article. A collision, the investigation that follows, the recall, the lawsuit and the settlement stay in one file. Sources are archived the day they publish, because half of them will not open in two years.

Cases
231
Sources
591
Escalated
44
Updated
2026-08-02
Cases by year of incident

Eight years in, the curve bends up

02550752016201720182019202020212022202324202427202561202665
cases on record reached regulator, recall, lawsuit or settlement2026 is a partial year. Search feeds also surface recent publications more readily than old ones, so part of the rise is coverage, not incidence.
Escalation index

Not who is dangerous. Whose incidents reach consequences.

Fleet sizes are not public, so we cannot report incidents per thousand machines and will not pretend otherwise. What we can measure is internally normalised: the share of a company's recorded incidents that reached a regulator, a recall or a court.

CompanyCasesEscalatedShareSince
Zoox119
82%
2024
Cruise114
36%
2022
Waymo296
21%
2023
Tesla142
14%
2019
Starship Technologies91
11%
2019
Unitree Robotics130
0%
2025

Companies with fewer than 8 cases are left out of the index: at that sample size a single case moves the share by double digits. Currently outside it: Boston Dynamics 5, Baidu 5, Intuitive Surgical 4, Serve Robotics 3, Coco Robotics 3, Ecovacs 3, Avride 3, iRobot 3, and 33 more.

Registry

Latest cases

The open web yields a handful of genuinely new events per week. Most additions are developments on cases already on file, or older events entering the register for the first time.

Methodology

What this data does not say

A register is useful exactly as far as it is honest about its own limits. Coverage is English-language, so incidents in Shenzhen or Osaka appear only when someone wrote about them in English. Minor faults never reach the news at all. And a denominator exists for only a handful of cases, where a recall disclosed how many units were out there.

Read the methodology
Escalation chain

Every case carries a position on this chain. The red line on a case, a company card or a table row is the same measurement.

  1. First report
  2. Investigation opened
  3. Regulator acts
  4. Recall issued
  5. Claim filed
  6. Paid or resolved

Everything above is free and always will be.

Every case, every timeline and every source link stays open and indexable. Paid products cover convenience: company dossiers as a finished PDF, alerts on the companies you track, and export with an API.