Mall security is not exactly a glorious job, no matter how you present it, and it’s a job that makes sense to have robots in place to do it. But it appears we’re still a little while away from Paul Blart being handed his walking papers, as a mall security robot just ran over a toddler.
The incident happened at the Stanford Shopping Center, a mall in Palo Alto, Calif. The toddler’s parents claim he hit his head on the robot, which considering he’s 16 months old seems fairly logical, and fell over. The robot, however, didn’t seem to notice and rolled right over the kid’s foot. Fortunately, there were no serious injuries, but the parents are more than a little dismayed at seeing a 300-pound security device treat their child like a speed bump.
The robot, developed by Knightscope, should, at least in theory, be able to sense the difference between a hard tile mall floor and a squishy toddler, but those sensors may not have worked, or simply nobody thought there might be small children in a mall. Either way, the robot is still much safer than its Chinese equivalent. Overseas, they gave that thing a taser, since China clearly missed the entire point of the Terminator franchise. The takeaway here? Teach your children a healthy fear of robots. That way they’ll survive the coming insurrection.
(via ABC7 News)