The Russian town of Perm looked like the set of a sci-fi film when a rouge robot ran away from its lab during autonomy testing, confirming that robots really do have feelings.
To makes matters worse, the robot decided to hitchhike to safety, and caused a minor traffic jam in the process. Thankfully, a policeman parked his car in the way of the desperate machine before it become the first robotic roadkill. Then what appears to be a bystander escorted the poor thing off the road.
It turns out the robot escaped through an open gate before stopping in the middle of the street. How it was able to elude its engineers is the real question—maybe it got some robot friends to distract them?
Here is a full statement (translated) from Promobot, the creators of the Rosie-the-robot-looking artificially intelligent machine.
“Testing involves proving autonomous movement of the robot without control. At one stage, our engineer, on his way to work, opened the the site gates and forgot to close them. The robot, not seeing any obstacle, quietly left the site limits. He passed fifty meters, fell to the roadway and luckily stopped when battery ran out. We discovered the theft, after about 40 minutes. The engineer noticed that the gate was open and saw the robot. By the time the partially paralyzed robot made it to the middle of the road, the traffic arrived. However, some drivers specifically slowed down to look at the robot.”
And just when we thought automating was going to be the solution to all of our road rage.
H/T Laughing Squid