A Silicon Valley engineer was arrested after allegedly knocking down a 300-pound robocop
A 41-year old hardware engineer reportedly knocked down a security robot at the headquarters of a startup called Knightscope, Mountain View police told Business Insider.
Knightscope makes robots that look a little like R2-D2 from Star Wars. Their most famous unit, K5, is a five-foot tall, 300-pound machine designed to wander around corporate campuses and malls, scanning the area with a camera and calling security if anything is out of the ordinary.
It was one of these K5 robots that was allegedly knocked down last Wednesday by the hardware engineer, according to ABC7, which first reported the incident.
Police say they arrived to Knightscope at 8:15 in the evening, and found a Knightscope employee detaining the hardware engineer, who police said smelled strongly of alcohol.
Police say that the 41-year-old knocked over a robot in the startup's front parking lot and that the hardware engineer never got into the Knightscope headquarters. He was arrested for alleged prowling and public intoxication.
The startup seems to be enjoying the publicity, with one co-founder telling ABC7 that the arrest was a "testament" to his startup's technology. Most recently, Knightscope was in the headlines for one of its robots running over a child.
The robot appears to be in fine working order:
Knightscope did not immediately return a request for comment.