Robot Suicide? Droid Security Guard Drowns In Washington DC Mall Fountain

A Knightscope robot security guard tasked with patrolling the Georgetown Waterfront shopping area in Washington, D.C. apparently rolled into a fountain and drowned itself Monday.

A tweet from Bilal Farooqui brought widespread attention to the bizarre scene and the robot’s “suicide” on Monday afternoon: “Our D.C. office building got a security robot. It drowned itself. We were promised flying cars, instead we got suicidal robots.”

The shopping mall and office complex beat in the nation’s capital apparently caused the beeping, whirring and whistling robot to fall over the fountain steps and collapse into the water, Ladders first reported. The array of ultrasonic sensors and audio detection devices the robot uses to patrol areas like the shopping center couldn’t keep it from plunging to its mechanical death.

Read: What Happens If A Robot Kills Or Commits A Crime?

One of the main features of the robot – its ability to capture photos and video of potential suspicious activity – likely recorded its own demise first-hand.

Not The Robot's First Bizarre Run-In With Humanity

But this isn’t the first time one of the Knightscope robots has caused a strange stir. In April, the robot security guard was knocked to the ground by a drunk 41-year-old man in Mountain View, California. In addition, the robot accidentally “smacked” into a 16-month-old child at the Stanford Shopping Center in California in July 2016, New York Magazine reports.

Uber also employs the droid to patrol several car-inspection lots in San Francisco and elsewhere.

The 5-foot, 300-pound autonomous Knightscope droid is intended to patrol public areas and businesses using a variety of video cameras, thermal imaging sensors and microphones. The Silicon Valley creation, K5, was first developed and tested in 2013. It detects abnormal noises such as gunshots in addition to being able to detect odd temperature changes before notifying local – human – law enforcement.

In 2013, another "robot suicide" reportedly happened after an Irobot Roomba 760 climbed onto a hot plate in Kirchdorf, Austria and lit itself ablaze. The owners of the robot insisted the machine had been switched off but somehow reactived itself in the fatal kitchen incident.