As much as Skynet from the Terminator movies get memed on with every bit of news involving robots or AI, every once in a while we see reports that remind us that we’re just not there yet in real life. A recent example took place late last week in Macau, as a humanoid robot was led away by local police. The crime of the bot, as it were, was harassing a pedestrian.
The Macau Post cites local broadcaster TDM which reports that the robot, which looks like a Unitree G1, startled a 70-year old woman while walking down a street called Rua Sul do Patane. Clips of the incident that surfaced show the woman shouting at the robot in Cantonese as if it were a person, before it was led away by the police.
While “there was no physical contact” between the woman and the robot, the woman told police that she felt unwell after the incident. She was then taken to a nearby hospital to be examined, and would be discharged the next morning.
Per the report, the bot was owned by a local tutorial centre in the neighbourhood, called the Study Hard Education Centre. The head of the centre was cited as saying that the place had scheduled multiple promotional activities using robots in recent times. These were generally met with positive feedback, so this specific incident looks to be the outlier of the lot.
In this specific incident, reports point to a local man in his fifties as the operator of the bot. He told police that he was testing the robot, and looking to improve its operation for the centre’s commercial promotional activities in the future. The man was told to be more careful when operating robots in public spaces to avoid endangering or frightening pedestrians.
The Unitree G1 is noted to be priced at CNY 85,000 (~RM48,467) in China. That being said, The Register found a listing for the bot on Alibaba for seemingly a lot higher. Specs on the bot include a height of 1.32m, a weight of about 35kg, and a combination of 3D LiDar and depth cameras for its eyes. Internally, it packs 16GB of RAM, 2TB of storage capacity, and a 13-cell 9,000 mAh battery that powers it for up to 12 hours.
(Source: The Macau Post, X, Alibaba via The Register)
