A 70-year old woman in China loudly shouted at a robot to leave her alone, but the bot instead stood its ground and did a “raise the roof” move when the woman called it “freaking crazy.”
Witnesses said the woman was out for a walk around Rua Sul do Patane in Macau around 9 p.m. on March 5, looking at her phone, when the bot approached her from behind and she turned, startled.
The next part is caught on video.
According to the clip, the woman shouted in Cantonese: “You’re making my heart race! You’ve got plenty to do, so what’s the point of messing around with this? Are you freaking crazy?”
The Unitree Robotics G-1 then appeared to do a “raise the roof” motion with both arms while she continued to shout. The video cuts to the police escorting G-1 away.
The Unitree Robotics G-1 sells for about 85,000 yuan in China, but can be bought in the US through Alibaba for $15,300. According to the product listing, it is powered by Nvidia Orin chips which max out at 100 TOPS and comes equipped with 3D LiDAR depth cameras to scan its surroundings. Internally it runs on 16GB of memory, has 2TB of storage, and a 13-cell 9000mAh battery.
However, the 80-pound robot has virtually no upper body strength, with a maximum arm payload of about 6 pounds.
Police said the robot did not make contact with the woman, but she was hospitalized for evaluation and later released.
The robot was returned to its operator, who was nearby testing the unit and improving performance for an upcoming promotional use to market an education center nearby, the paper stated.
The same robot was used in a three promotional activities for the education center last week, according to the Macau Post. And it had even walked the UNESCO World Heritage site Ruins of St. Paul’s and Cotai Strip, according to the operator who said it generally received positive feedback.
Police did not cite the bot’s operator but told him to be more careful when deploying AI to the edge.