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Uber Hires a Robot To Patrol Its Parking Lot and It's Way Cheaper Than a Security Guard (fusion.net)
Fusion's Kashmir Hill is reporting about a five-foot-tall, white, egg-shaped robot that one can find at the company's inspection lot near Mission Bay in San Francisco. The K5 robot is a stand-in for a human security guard, and it sports multiple high-definition cameras for 360-degree vision, a thermal camera, a laser rangefinder, a weather sensor, a license-plate recognition camera, four microphones, and person recognition capabilities. The report adds:If someone suspicious comes into the lot, or starts messing with a car, the robot can't tase them or break out any weapons. Instead the robot can set off an alarm, send a signal to human security personnel, and record everything that person does to be used against them later by police. Customers of Knightscope, the company that manufactures the aforementioned robot don't buy the machines. They rent them, usually two at a time, so one can charge its battery while the other patrols. The cost is $7 an hour. "For the cost of a single-shift security guard, you get a machine that will patrol for 24 hours a day 7 days a week," said Stephens, citing wages of $25 to $35 hour for a human security guard.
Putting aside "we-will-all-be-replaced-by-robots-soon", this is actually a good idea, and the company making them has the right strategy; much better to charge an hourly rent instead of a huge upfront fee!
Apart from the employment issue, I can see a lot of benefits, robots aren't racist and robots aren't rude, and I assume security to actually be better with the robots in place.
Probably contrasting the bill rate vs take home pay. The latter is what the guard gets, the former is what the contracting company gets, meaning it's all the money for benefits, taxes, and profit etc padded on to that. So yes, $25-35, though the guard actually only probably gets around $10 of that or so.
Fortunately most cars aren't parked in stairwells. Therefore security robot can still do its job.
Doubtful. If CCTV type systems and bait cars don't stop punks from doing it now, this won't. If anything, they'll likely find it as a tempting target to attack, especially since it's an inanimate object and the crime of attacking/destroying/defacing/etc will be significantly lower then against a person. On the other hand, those punks won't try it with a real person or people around. The why is easy to figure out too, people are unpredictable, thus they could simply have the shit beaten out of them or in the worst case get shot. And the penalties for attacking a person are much higher.
Even dumb criminals have self preservation instincts.
Om, nomnomnom...
Instead the robot can set off an alarm
Which is known as a deterrent. A quite good one at that.
As for better than a security guard, that remains to be seen. But between an overweight, mouth drooler with a can of pepper spray meandering a parking lot and a mobile recording device capable of blaring noise, flashing lights and bringing lots of unwanted attention, the latter seems better to me.
Just for starters, the latter has a perfect recall of the preceding events. Good luck getting the height or sex or anything useful from the security guards story.
Brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
A chicken with a badge would also cost less than a human security guard. Cost alone is not a great stat to compare competing solutions. How well does the robot do it's job compared to a human guard?