Tim Hornyak at C|Net writes:
Florida International University is trying to build a remote-operated law enforcement robot that will be controlled by disabled police officers. Would you like a bot on the beat?
You’ve double-parked your car to pick something up when a robot rolls up and threatens to give you a ticket. You might laugh, but the thing’s talking with a human voice.
Researchers at Florida International University’sDiscovery Lab are working with a member of the U.S. Navy Reserves to build telepresence robots that could patrol while being controlled by disabled police officers and military vets. In a sense, they would be hybrid man-machine cops, like RoboCop.
Lieutenant Commander Jeremy Robins has given $20,000 to the lab and borrowed two robots valued at nearly $500,000 from the Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC) to realize his vision of bringing some of the thousands of disabled cops and soldiers in the U.S. back to the workforce.
They would work as patrol officers, operating wheeled telepresence robots and doing everything from responding to 911 calls and writing parking tickets to ensuring the security of nuclear facilities. The cybercops would have to be rugged enough to work outdoors, but what would they look like?
“The big design hurdle we face is, strangely enough, the exact same hurdle police officers face with the public every day,” Robins says.
“The telebot has to look intimidating and authoritative enough so that people obey its commands — because of course it’s not the telebot telling you what to do, it’s the disabled police officer controlling the telebot who’s telling you what to do.
“On the flip side, it has to be approachable enough so that a lost 3-year-old feels comfortable coming up to the telebot and asking for help finding her mother. That’s a challenging design problem, and one which I’m sure will take many iterations before we get it perfectly right.”
Students and professors at the Discovery Lab have been working with the two-wheeled, military-grade IHMC robots built under a $2 million DARPA initiative. The patrol bot prototype, which will have two-way video and audio, will be based on them. Robins is also trying to get NASA to help out with its Robonaut tech.
Remote-controlled robots are already used in military, medical, and business applications, and the lab believes law enforcement is a natural next step. The legal implications related to police behavior, however, would likely be a major hurdle to deployment. For instance, would roving robots be seen as glorified security cams on wheels, or more like substitutes for human officers?
I’ll bet the patrol bots get deluged with one-liner requests: “Dead or alive, you’re coming with me.”
What do you think about this?
The problem with this when you get these roid rage jackasses behind the controls more people will wind up like Kelly Thomas, and with fewer punches because it will be a machine hitting you.
And what of spitting on a cop bot will that become a law too ?
Lots to think about before letting this out on the streets.
What a coincidence–I’m designing a robot to rob banks.
“The telebot has to look intimidating and authoritative
enough so that people obey its commands — because
of course it’s not the telebot telling you what to do, it’s
the disabled police officer controlling the telebot who’s
telling you what to do.
“On the flip side, it has to be approachable enough so
that a lost 3-year-old feels comfortable coming up to
the telebot and asking for help finding her mother.”
Again, LE thinks they are in Iraq. How about respectful instead of intimidating? The attitude is nothing less than an insult to the public.Their words say much about how they view their relationship to the public. Note that intimidation comes before approachable.
The premis also insults the public in that we’ve gotten used to scary looking robots in movies. But go ahead and make it look like Megatron. It fits your attitude perfectly.
On the other hand, a robot would have little justification for the use of deadly force, as it is by nature only a device with only financial value. In fact, all use of force would effectively be restricted, since justifying beating someone half to death would be hard to justify under the religion of officer safety.
What a waste of good money.
If they really want to make it look friendly, remove the robotic head when talking with someone and have a LCD screen of the cop’s face through digital camera feed. If under fire the screen could retract and have some sort of shield covering it. However, since hackers always seem to have an ability to get where they aren’t wanted, how do we know that criminals couldn’t hijack these to use against cops…just like what happened in Robocop 3.
Let’s see, take a cop, who already has issues with power and control over others, take away the use of his legs, so he feels even more inadequate and weak, and then give him control over a robot with machine levels of strength and force. Brilliant fucking idea, guys!!