Millennials heading home from the bar at around midnight last week stopped in the concourse of the Times Square subway station — dollar slices in hand — to take selfies with a 420-pound robot.
The NYPD’s Knightscope K5 Autonomous Security Robot has been making appearances in the station since September, when Mayor Eric Adams declared it would act as a crime deterrent and provide real-time information about where and when to deploy officers to a crime scene.
It’s shaped like a penguin and can’t go up and down stairs. But it has a 360-degree camera on its head and a coin-sized button that connects to a human dispatcher for 311. Video from the robot’s cameras is streamed to the NYPD headquarters in lower Manhattan.
The robot’s cameras add to the many that already exist around the Times Square subway station. “We have more cameras than a Las Vegas casino,” MTA President Richard Davey said at the robot unveiling in September.
The K5 acts as an extra set of eyes and a roving call box, Davey said. Eventually, police will use the robot to respond to 911 calls inside the station and get “a closer look into what’s going on,” said Vladimir Boguslavsky, a detective in the NYPD Transit Bureau specializing in research and development.
The city is leasing the robot from the security and robotics company Knightscope for $9 an hour, which, according to Adams, is more cost-effective than paying human transit cops. Currently it’s escorted on its midnight-to-6 a.m. shift by two police officers, but eventually it’s expected to patrol alone, Adams said.
“This is below minimum wage,” he said when announcing the robot’s two-month pilot program. “No bathroom breaks, no meal breaks. This is a good investment.”
NYPD officials said the robot does not record audio or use facial recognition technology, though Knightscope’s other robots — some of which are used in airports, hospitals and casinos across the United States — do have facial recognition software, per…
Read the full article here
Leave a Reply