A food delivery robot was caught on video happily making its way through a cordoned off crime scene in Los Angeles. In the video that went viral on Twitter and Reddit, the robot doesn’t seem to care about the looks it receives from police officers.
The footage shows a Serve Robotics model, described as a “next generation robotic fleet,” as it approaches the police cordon. A helpful human removes the tape to allow the robot to pass the scene and proceed to its next delivery.
Serve Robotics says its latest generation of robots can “routinely operate without human intervention using multiple sensor modalities” (active sensors like lidar and ultrasonic, as well as passive sensors like cameras) to safely navigate busy city sidewalks and have built-in capabilities to ensure safe operation. He boasts that he can “trust”.
But as can be seen in the video, zero-emission robots have yet to master crime scenes.
A food delivery robot forces it’s way across a police crime scene. pic.twitter.com/T5DaET5Q5b
— Film The Police LA (@FilmThePoliceLA) September 13, 2022
The incident where the police robot failed in the classroom
Even though the police want to get help from robots from time to time, they cannot prevent interesting events from happening. In 2019, California commissioned a “RoboCop” to police a public park. On June 18, RoboCop began patrolling public areas in a relentless search for crime. RoboCop finally faced its first test in October when a fight broke out in the parking lot of Salt Lake Park in downtown Los Angeles, NBC News reported. A witness, Cogo Guebara, saw the fight and immediately approached the robot with “POLICE” in capital letters on it for help.
He was waiting for the robot to call the cops for help when he pressed the emergency alert button. But the robot didn’t, and instead told it to get out of the way.
“I was pressing the button but it was saying ‘get out of the way.’ It just kept ringing and ringing and I kept pressing and pressing,” Guebara told NBC News at the time.
While another witness, Rudy Espericuta, was calling the cops the old-fashioned way from his phone, RoboCop continued its pre-programmed patrol route, stopping occasionally to tell people to “keep the park clean.”
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