A matter taken very seriously. In South Korea, a town hall has opened an investigation following the fall of a robot employed as a municipal civil servant. He was found last week at the bottom of a staircase, inert. Just before, witnesses saw the robot “turning in circles as if something was there,” explained a manager of the municipal team.
Developed by the Californian company Bear Robotics, it had been helping residents of the municipality of Gumi with administrative tasks for almost a year. He worked from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. and had his own civil service card. Unlike other androids confined to a single level, he could call the elevator and move from one floor to another.
“The work was too hard for the robot”
To understand what really happened, “parts have been collected and will be analyzed” by the company that designed it, added the manager. In the meantime, the municipal team says it is upset by the fall of this robot, which therefore seems to have thrown itself from the top of a staircase. “He was officially part of the town hall, he was one of us,” lamented an official.
The local press picked up on the subject, with some headlines asking, on the front page, “why this hard-working civil servant acted in this way” or if “the work was too hard for the robot”. South Korea is one of the countries keen on robotics. It has the highest density of robots in the world, with one android for every ten employees, according to the International Federation of Robotics.
