Microsoft Rolls Out Robot Security Guards

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft is testing a group of five robot security guards. They contain a sophisticated sensor suite that includes 360-degree HD video, thermal imaging, night vision, LIDAR, and audio recorders. They can also detect various chemicals and radiation signatures, and do some rudimentary behavioral analysis on people they see. (And they look a bit like Daleks.) The robots are unarmed, so we don't have to worry about a revolt just yet, but they can sound an alarm and call for human officers. They weigh about 300 lbs each, can last roughly a day on a battery charge, and know to head to the charging station when they're low on power.

Comments

Help .. I've fallen over

[OzPeter]

And I can't get up.

From the Ars article: Coming soon: Slow, heavy, shrieking, autonomous robot rent-a-cops

Should anybody choose to attack the K5, as opposed to walking briskly away, the unit can react with a shrieking alarm that Stephens described as like "a car alarm but much more intense." That will probably happen shortly after the K5 falls to the ground, unable to right itself, which actually happened during Knightscope's MIT robot demo.