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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.
1. wait for SF to deploy these in all major parking locations
2. wait a few years for snow....http://snowbrains.com/san-francisco-ca-rarely-see-snow/
3. break into everything while the useless 400 sensor robot can't get to or from its charging station
4. profit
It will be better to purchase from an owner who is a good farmer and a good builder.
That's the part that has me confused.
Okay, so this is basically a mobile camera with enough intelligence to note when something is happening that is out of the ordinary. Not a bad thing.
But then this comes:
If someone suspicious comes into the lot, or starts messing with a car [...] the robot can set off an alarm, send a signal to human security personnel [...]
So, I still need to pay for a human being to sit around and wait for the robot to signal that something bad is happening.
I suppose I can hire one security guard to "monitor" two or three areas (i.e., wait around for the robot to signal that something suspicious may be happening) and then go check it out, rather than hiring 2 or 3 security guards.
So this seems like it makes more sense for larger areas where one security guard wouldn't be enough to patrol.
An alarm might be a deterrent, but only because of the unknowns. If a human guard raised the alarm, the burglar doesn't know if the guard is armed, or how many more guards will arrive, or if they are armed as well. With this weeble bot, a lot of those unknowns go out the window. We already know that the bot is not armed. If a company has one of these bots, then it means they wanted to save money on real human guards, so there will likely be quite a delay before any humans arrive after hearing the alarm.
I would gamble that criminals would TARGET places with these bots more than places with human guards.