K5, the first police-robot

                                  K5, the first police-robot

                                      

Dubbed knightscope, this high-performance robot was designed to do the job of a police officer. Packed with cameras and sensors, the robot is aimed at monitoring companies and could even expand its actions in the future. And it's not science fiction.

Created by a company of Silicon Valley, this small high performance robot could someday replace the night guards and surveillance teams. Called knightscope (or K5) by its inventors, it is intended to secure the local hi-tech firms, shopping malls or offices.

                                 

A real miniature robocop :

Top of 1.50m, this robot has a automomie 24 hours, is equipped with surveillance cameras, sensors, detectors of smells, a thermal imaging system and scanners. Suffice to say anything to effectively crisscross an area and track down any suspicious event. With its scanners, knightscope can thus read nearly 300 license plates per minute. And when a suspicious noise received, the robot immediately mark its location and then manages to geotag with its GPS and its technology borrowed from Google Car. If someone is also trying to bring down the K5, then it will trigger an alarm and automatically take videos.

                        

Currently building seven in number, the robot should already be effective by the end of the year to patrol within companies. In the future, Stacy Stephens, the co-founder of the firm that designed the robot, hope to see this technology develop more for she said "free man dangerous and grunt work". If today the robot is striving to monitor firms in the Silicon Valley, its future could be extended to university campuses or residential areas.