The new K5 units have a look that resembles R2-D2 from “Star Wars,” but their casual design masks a highly advanced robot that its creators hope will drastically cut down on crime. Weighing in at 300 pounds, the five-foot K5 can patrol a neighborhood and uses a built-in laser to form a 3D map of the surrounding area in 270-degree sweeps. Four built-in cameras, meanwhile, are capable of scanning up to 1,500 license plates a minute.
“Data collected through these sensors is processed through our predictive analytics engine, combined with existing business, government and crowdsourced social data sets, and subsequently assigned an alert level that determines when the community and the authorities should be notified of a concern,” the company’s website states.
"Clearly, this kind of surveillance technology has an unbounded capacity to collect personal information that a single patrol officer doesn't," Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the watchdog group Electronic Privacy Information Center, said to USA Today.
"These are the same concerns we're facing with CCTV (closed-circuit television) and Google's mapping cars. Laws need to be updated to acknowledge these technologies, and companies, in turn, need to act responsibly.”
As RT
reported last week, a study by the Electronic Frontier Foundation found predator drones flew over 700 missions between 2010 and 2012 on behalf of numerous agencies, including local law enforcement. Cattle rancher Rodney Brossart of North Dakota became the first American to be arrested with the help of a drone back in 2011. He was just recently sentenced to three and a half years in prison for terrorizing local police, though his attorney argued the drone was dispatched without a warrant.
