While finally preparing my slides for the ‘Knowledge Bases and Agents’ Workshop time was running out for me, so I had to stretch the usual workday to well after midnight. When climbing down the stairs from my office in Building 32 I noticed activity and light on the lower parking lot … I small entity was moving along slowly but steadily, lights on …
A little two wheel robot was obviously on its way to do something. Having worked the night to finish my talk on the Autonomous Operations vision which includes actually some pictures and a short movie clip from the movie Wall-E I could not help but being a little shocked that the robots are taking over. I did not see the earlier CERN News posting end of July about this new security robot program. Of course after gathering myself and my thoughts I concluded these should be some robots checking on security and I did not think too much more of it.
In the first video the bot see the stairs and ‘realizes’ it has to circumvent them, of course I did not immediately realize this.
In the second video the bot makes its way to the upper level of the stairs by climbing the relatively steep but reasonably smooth mount avoiding the stairs. It then continues and seems to get somewhat upset by the drain cover that changes its course unexpectedly, or maybe it was because I got a little too close?
It came back when I talked with Martin and Johannes about this encounter in the Baobab cafe today and we all agreed these should be some site supervision bots. Martin of course googled it and found the post. We are already living in the future.
