K5...

The K5 Security Robot

As the sun set on a warm November afternoon, a quartet of five-foot-tall, 300-pound shiny white robots patrolled in front of Building 1 on Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus. Looking like a crew of slick Daleks imbued with the grace of Fred Astaire, they whirred quietly across the concrete in different directions, stopping and turning in place so as to avoid running into trash cans, walls, and other obstacles.

The robots managed to appear both cute and intimidating. This friendly-but-not-too-friendly presence is meant to serve them well in jobs like monitoring corporate and college campuses, shopping malls, and schools.

Knightscope, a startup based in Mountain View, California, has been busy designing, building, and testing the robot, known as the K5, since 2013. Seven have been built so far, and the company plans to deploy four before the end of the year at an as-yet-unnamed technology company in the area. The robots are designed to detect anomalous behavior, such as someone walking through a building at night, and report back to a remote security center.

A Dr. Who-like Dalek - as the article alludes - comes to mind, as well as Weeble; WALL-E and EVE or salt and pepper shakers. Weighing in at 300 pounds, I hope no one is tempted to tip them over and put themselves in line for next year's Darwin Awards. I do have privacy concerns, as the video embed brings out. I am cautiously optimistic this is a good thing, but outfitted with battlefield weaponry, specifically for urban crowd control and artificial intelligence, and it could start looking and acting...like a Dalek.

Also, like a mountain - because it will soon be ubiquitously "there": someone will try to hack it.

MIT Technology Review: Rise of the Robot Security Guards, Rachel Metz