If you thought all wide-eyed, gliding, egg-shaped robots were as cute and harmless as Wall-E, then think again.
Last Thursday at a Stanford shopping center, a security robot ran over a 16-month-old toddler’s foot, much to the horror of his parents and bystanders. Luckily, the child didn’t suffer any major injury.
“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,” Harwin’s mom Tiffany Teng told ABC 7.
According to one of the mall’s security guards, this is the second time that the autonomous machine has trampled over a kid. Another was hurt from the same robot just days before.
The robot is a 5-foot-tall, 300-pound security machine — the same one used to patrol Uber parking lots around California — made by Silicon Valley start-up Knightscope. The shopping center introduced it last year.
The robots do not bear weapons and don’t have the power to harm individuals, but are equipped with several high-resolution video cameras, a laser range finder, thermal imaging sensors, and facial recognition software designed to alert authorities of abnormal noises and criminal activity.
Asked to comment on the report that one of their machines may have severely injured someone, Knightscope’s VP of marketing, Stacy Stephens, told Fusion she was absolutely horrified by the incident.
She said this was the first time such a glitch happened with its machines having operated for 35,000 hours and having traveled over 25,000 miles.
“Our core mission is to ensure public safety, and we are taking this report very seriously” she said via email. “We have reached out to the mother to invite her to our office to meet the entire Knightscope team.”