A video that has been doing the rounds on Chinese social media appears to show a humanoid robot malfunctioning and erratically “attacking” the crowd at a festival in Tianjin.
The footage, shot during the Tianjin Winter Gala Festival on February 9th, shows one of several Unitree H1 humanoid robots seemingly attacking a spectator who had extended their hand out for a handshake.
Instead of responding to the gesture, the robot displays erratic arm movements and aggressively rushes toward the crowd before being pulled back by security guards and what looks to be a robot supervisor.
The H1 robot appears to calm down before the video cuts off, but its violent outburst has raised concerns about the use of these autonomous machines around humans.
Marketed as a General-Purpose Humanoid Robot, the H1 has become one of the most popular commercially available humanoid robots in China. Standing about 180 cm (5ft 10in) tall and weighing about 42 kilograms (92.5 lbs), the Unitree H1 robot has a moving speed of 3.3 meters per s second, various mobility options, and a battery capacity of 864Wh. It is currently selling for $90,000.
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Developer Unitree has addressed the viral video showing one of its H1 robots behaving aggressively, calling it “an accident” most likely caused “by a software setting or a malfunctioning sensor”, and adding that it had already taken precautions to prevent such accidents from occurring in the future.
Unitree’s statement on the incident didn’t quite put everyone’s minds at ease. While some deemed the video misleading, claiming that the H1 robot was merely trying to recover its balance after accidentally stumbling, others expressed concern about the danger of people being injured in such instances.
“A glimpse of the future in 10 years,” one person described the festival scene on Chinese microblogging platform Weibo. “It looks like a sci-fi horror movie,” another person commented.
China has been experiencing a robot boom in recent years, with several advanced models breaking records in multiple categories, but incidents like these spark concerns among the general public.
Watch the video below.
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