This robot is designed to keep people safe in the US, but it fell in a fountain and couldn’t get up
Incident and captured and shared on social media with tweeters joking robot was being ‘baptised’
By Antonio Villas-Boas
The Knightscope K5 security robot’s job is to be on the look out for crime.
It might also want to keep an eye on where it’s going.
Officer workers at the Georgetown Harbour office and retail space in Washington D.C. tweeted photos on Monday of the building’s K5 marooned and toppled over in a water fountain. The K5 is limbless, so it couldn’t lift itself out of the fountain, and good old fashioned humanity had to come to the rescue.
It was perfect fodder for comedic tweets:
The K5 is designed to act as an extra set of eyes for law-enforcement and security services in public spaces.
It’s unclear how this particular K5 ended up in the fountain, which has steps leading into the water. It’s possible it was the result of a prank. Earlier in April, a hardware engineer reportedly knocked over a 300-pound K5 robot, resulting in the engineer’s arrest.
We might laugh today at the shortcomings of robots, but there will surely be a day when they won’t be so easily toppled.
