Interesting article. I found this statement "The robot operates at a cost of about $6.25 per hour, the New York Times reports — more than a dollar below the U.S. minimum hourly wage." a bit worrying though. Will that set a new minimum wage or result in more unemployment?
Meh. A couple of well-placed stationary cameras and sensor arrays could do the same "crime prediction" analysis, without the risks of having two burly dudes swipe the robot and toss it into the back of a truck. If hackers can insert code into Target's credit card machines, they can figure out how to render K5 mute to GPS tracking, reprogram it, and sell it on the black market. Even if its OS is secure, its hardware is still accessible to anyone with a soldering iron.
If you need mobility, like for a a major public event, a small human-operated vehicle with the same sensors works as well, and doesn't cost nearly the same to purchase. Wages are over time; buying a robot involves a lot of expense, or in the case of a lease, a significant amount of trust the technology won't get outdated a year after you've bought it. You're still stuck with the lease.
The company should first prove the crime analysis/prediction technology, then apply it to a variety of carriages, including the side of buildings, airport terminals, bus depots, and yes, eventually robots. But people will just look at this and think it's too far-fetched.
The main problem of having 300 pound autonomous robots running loose among crowds is liability. Can they absolutely guarantee it won't falsely identify a step, and come crashing down on some 2 year old child? Or be intentionally pushed over by some pranksters making a YouTube viral video? Apart from the millions in damages, it would be the last robot of its type built in a long time. We're just not there yet from a safety standpoint.
I'm sure they've done a lot of thinking about it, too, but over the years I've seen nearly all of these "shoot the moon" products fizzle.
In my lifetime I do hope to someday see autonomous robots roaming among the populace, but the technology just isn't there yet. These types of sentry robots are perfect for controlled environments, though.
This still leaves their data mining and profiling technology to existing platforms, which also tend to be cheaper to build and maintain -- though it forces them to compete in an area where there are already a number of entrenched players.
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Wait until the RCLU gets wind of this!
If you need mobility, like for a a major public event, a small human-operated vehicle with the same sensors works as well, and doesn't cost nearly the same to purchase. Wages are over time; buying a robot involves a lot of expense, or in the case of a lease, a significant amount of trust the technology won't get outdated a year after you've bought it. You're still stuck with the lease.
The company should first prove the crime analysis/prediction technology, then apply it to a variety of carriages, including the side of buildings, airport terminals, bus depots, and yes, eventually robots. But people will just look at this and think it's too far-fetched.
The main problem of having 300 pound autonomous robots running loose among crowds is liability. Can they absolutely guarantee it won't falsely identify a step, and come crashing down on some 2 year old child? Or be intentionally pushed over by some pranksters making a YouTube viral video? Apart from the millions in damages, it would be the last robot of its type built in a long time. We're just not there yet from a safety standpoint.
In my lifetime I do hope to someday see autonomous robots roaming among the populace, but the technology just isn't there yet. These types of sentry robots are perfect for controlled environments, though.
This still leaves their data mining and profiling technology to existing platforms, which also tend to be cheaper to build and maintain -- though it forces them to compete in an area where there are already a number of entrenched players.