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posted by CoolHand on Tuesday July 18 2017, @08:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the can't-take-it-anymore dept.

The automation revolution, where most of our jobs are replaced by robots and we spend the rest of our days floating around on rubber rings sipping piña coladas, has hit a snag: a Knightscope K5 security bot appears to have fallen down some stairs and drowned itself in a water feature.

The scene, which took place at the mixed-use Washington Harbour development in Washington DC, was captured by Bilal Farooqui on Twitter. One local office worker reported that the K5 robot had only been patrolling the complex for a few days. Knightscope said in a statement that the "isolated incident" was under investigation, and that a new robot would be delivered to Washington Harbour this week for free.

We first wrote about the Dalek-like K5 back in 2014. The first bots were deployed on campuses and shopping complexes near the company's headquarters in Mountain View, California. The company has never disclosed how many robots are on active duty, but this is the first time I've heard of a K5 deployment outside of Silicon Valley.

The K5, which is equipped with lots and lots of sensors, is ostensibly an interesting piece of high-tech kit. It has a 360-degree video camera array, sensitive microphones, air quality sensors, and even thermal imaging capabilities. The cameras can apparently scan up to 1,500 car number plates per minute; the microphones can detect gun shots and other notable sounds. Autonomous mobility is provided by a mix of lidar, radar, and the video camera array—but given that it missed the steps down into the Washington Harbour water feature, perhaps the software needs tweaking.

Source: ArsTechnica

Also at BBC. Knightscope autonomous robot.


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Murdoc on Tuesday July 18 2017, @11:51PM (4 children)

    by Murdoc (2518) on Tuesday July 18 2017, @11:51PM (#541232) Homepage

    When I was a teenager I bought an old book called How to Build A Real Working Robot (I think, something like that). It had been written in the 1970s sometime, and was meant to use parts and materials that were readily available at the time. For example, it's chassis was supposed to be from a child's electric car (the kind they ride around in). It was designed to be completely autonomous, including sensing when its battery was low on power, finding its recharging base, going there and plugging itself in. When it was recharged, it'd pop out again and begin wandering around on its own, navigating obstacles the same way a roomba does today.

    My point is that it also had a feature for dealing with stairs. It had a spring loaded peg on the bottom of it, near the front, that would press down along the floor, but could be pushed up when it say hit minor bumps. However, if it ran into any sort of cliff, like stairs going down, the peg would be pushed down by the spring below what would normally floor level, and the robot would sense that and instantly stop. Pretty simple, right? Maybe this K-5 could have used something like that. In fact, don't the roombas do something like that? Like I said, 1970s tech. Heck, I remember reading about similar techniques used in the USSR to make fully automated factories in the 1950s. Yeesh.

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  • (Score: 2) by IndigoFreak on Wednesday July 19 2017, @12:05AM (3 children)

    by IndigoFreak (3415) on Wednesday July 19 2017, @12:05AM (#541239)

    It's been in service for a while, so I'm surprised it can't handle steps. I wouldn't be shocked if we found out later it was pushed in.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 19 2017, @12:53AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 19 2017, @12:53AM (#541258)

      Fucks the robots coming straight from the cyber realm

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 19 2017, @01:17AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 19 2017, @01:17AM (#541262)

      Looking at the photos of the bottom (floating on one side) I see two large drive wheels and two free caster wheels. Nothing obvious that would let it use stairs.

      Bigger, but otherwise similar to the drive system for the early Terrapin Turtle robot that worked with Logo,
          http://www.theoldrobots.com/turtle4.html [theoldrobots.com]
      If you got the drive system calibrated carefully, it was a fairly accurate plotter. The pen is centered between the two drive wheels, with solenoid for pen_up and pen_down.

    • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday July 19 2017, @04:17PM

      by tangomargarine (667) on Wednesday July 19 2017, @04:17PM (#541485)

      If it's patrolling a campus outside, or a single floor of a building, why would it need to be able to deal with steps? We're talking about deploying a fleet of these things; one per floor shouldn't be unreasonable.

      --
      "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"