At Tom Wood, the underlying tech.
My biological father used to work for the Strategic Air Command (SAC) on the old McClellan AFB before they closed it down & sold it off. He worked in the distribution wharehouse as a "wrench monkey" fixing the automated carts that did essentially the same job mentioned in the article: picking parts off the shelves, delivering the parts to the distribution node, then following the control lines in the floor to the main computer order picking task.
The carts were battery operated & would automaticly back themselves into a charging port at the charging station, recharging their batteries while a fully charged cart would disconnect itself from the station & pick up the duties the first cart could no longer do.
The carts would follow a grid of control lines in the floor so they knew where they were in the facility at any given moment, could find any parts bin by it's X&Y coordinates on the grid, and were known to zoom around "like chickens with their asses on fire" since the governing main computer was unable to track those squishy meatbags trying to occupy the same floorspace.
A cart might fail for whatever reason & my BioDad would have to take a manual cart out to the dead one, determine the issue, & either fix it so it could resume normal operations or signal the computer to send out a replacement; he'd have to transfer the parts collected in the first cart to it's replacement, then signal the computer to take the second cart while he used the manual one to drag the dead one back to base for proper repairs.
Collisions at intersections were unfortunately _not_ a rare occurance. Main computer "knows" that there are at least two carts approaching the same intersection, it "knows" the exact speeds of each, "knows" the time to the second which cart will be allowed to proceed first, but then suddenly turn psychotic & accellerate both/all carts into the intersection as if it _WANTED_ to see the resulting cart carnage on the security cameras. My BioDad said it was common for the other SAC coworkers to take bets on how many minutes/hours/days would go before the next such "accident".
They went over the programs with an electron microscope fine toothed comb, but could never seem to find what was causing the glitch.
It comes as _no_ surprise to me that nobody has found the underlying root cause in the ~30 years since my BioDad was doing this stuff. If he were still alive today & heard about this incident, he'd probably laugh up an internal organ or two while exclaiming incredulously "What? They've STILL not fixed that fucker? And you call yourselves advanced? HA!"
I don't blame the company for the accident having happened, they probably haven't figured out how to prevent it yet, but what I _do_ fault them for is not being resilient enough to have prepared for just such a situation so they could work around it in spite of the minor setback. Drop fire suppressing foam to put out the fire, check. Send out a crew to clean up the mess, yes. But meanwhile have someone come in on the opposite side of the shelves to collect that affected parts bins, move said bins to a temp location, update the control computer to pick up $Item from $NewLocation, and continue fulfilling orders.
The folks at the SAC *demanded* that the place run 24/7/365 like clockwork to ensure supplies got to the troops that needed them; a week long delay was so far from "acceptable" that heads would have started rolling after the first hour of downtime. You don't tell a solder to stop firing their weapon for the next week while you find an alternate source for the ammo, you keep that ammo flowing if you want an effective fighting force. You don't tell the tank driver not to use 3rd gear until you can ship out a replacement part in a week, not if you don't want to turn your expensive tanks into lawn ornaments. Your (my BioDad's, this other company) entire business is delivering items just as fast as automation can go, so to have a failure in the system that you utterly failed to prepare for is just unforegivable.
TL;DR: Your failure to plan ahead proves you're not fit for duty.