A Starship Technologies delivery robot crossed a pedestrian crossing against a red light on the evening of October 26 in Tallinn, Estonia, forcing a city bus to brake hard and injuring up to nine standing passengers2.
The crash occurred at around 6 p.m. at the junction of Luise and Tehnika streets in the Kristiine district. The robot carried Bolt Food branding and entered the crosswalk from Tehnika Street, according to Tallinn City Transport (TLT). Bus-mounted footage showed the vehicle striking the robot and pushing it along the road1.
Signal misread and contested aftermath
Starship blamed the incident on a failure to interpret the traffic signal. Pepe Aaviksoo, the company's head of operations, told Estonian public broadcaster ERR that it was dark, an illuminated advertisement stood behind the traffic lights, and the pedestrian and vehicle signals sat in the same line of sight from the robot's perspective. No cars were approaching when the robot reached the crossing, which may have influenced its decision to proceed, Aaviksoo said.
The two sides gave conflicting accounts of what happened after the collision. TLT said the robot left the scene before police arrived. Starship disputed that characterization; the company said telemetry and sensor logs show the robot moved to a safe spot by the curb and stayed there for several minutes after its back-office team was alerted. Aaviksoo said the robot remained at the scene for about 10 minutes before the support team arranged for it to be moved off the roadway. TLT board member Andrei Novikov said the circumstances should be investigated by the authorities.
Operational response
Starship said its robots had crossed the same intersection more than 4,000 times without a problem and that the fixes would be mainly software-based. The company said its machines would not use the junction while an internal investigation runs. TLT has filed a police report.
ANALYSIS The incident is a concrete test of liability frameworks for sidewalk-scale autonomous vehicles: the robot operated under Bolt's delivery brand but was built and controlled by Starship, splitting commercial and technical responsibility across two companies.