Proving that the future is either too close or very far away, a mall security robot in Palo Alto, CA, allegedly injured a toddler by knocking him down and running him over.
"The robot hit my son's head and he fell down facing down on the floor and the robot did not stop and it kept moving forward," Tiffany Teng, the mother of 16-month year old Harwin, told the local ABC News.
The robot was developed by Knightscope, a security technology company that advertises both the robot at the mall, a K5, and it's smaller sibling, the K3, on the front page of its website. The K5 weighs 300 pounds and has been embraced by companies like Uber as a safe protection system. The K5 is autonomous, with no remote control, and has thermal detection capabilities, as well as weather sensors, license plate identification, and numerous other bells and whistles.
When asked by a reporter with Fusion if the K5 was like a moving security camera, Stacy Stephens, Knightscope's VP of marketing, said that such a description "oversimplifies it because there are so many sensors." he said. Stephens also told Fusion that would-be criminals up against the K5 would have "the gut-wrenching feeling of an intimidating physical presence." Knightscope often notes the K5's "physical presence" be it on its website or in a promotional video laden with EDM.
There's no word yet on how intimidated baby Harwin was, just that his leg began to swell and his knee got a nasty scrape from his encounter with the robot.
Source: Gizmodo