Anxiety As Robot Traffic Police Officer resumes Duty

Robots in an industrial environment can be understood, but robots as a traffic controller, may just seem too far-fetched, but that is reality in a northern Chinese city, according to reports monitored by The Eagle Correspondent.

There, a team of robots have been mobilised into operation to aid traffic police in tasks such as patrolling, information consulting, and providing accident alerts.

According to Zhou Zuoying, deputy head of the Traffic Management Research Institute of the Ministry of Public Security, the robots were developed by parties including the Handan municipal public security bureau in Hebei Province.

The robot was China’s first robot traffic police to be put on duty, loaded with sensors and can move autonomously in all directions. They can assist traffic police to take photos of vehicles violating parking rules, direct traffic and verify driver’s licenses. Ma Zhanshan, chief of Handan municipal public security bureau, said the bureau aims to use the robots around the clock in important public locations.

Deploying robots to do the bidding of police officers isn’t anything new for China. Back in 2016, it released its AnBot, which patrols the Shenzhen airport and in 2017 it began deploying the E-Patrol Robot Sheriff to patrol the streets of China. It already relies on advanced technology to monitor its citizens including deploying facial recognition systems to catch criminals and requiring all new cars to have RFID tags so drivers can’t cheat at tollways. A handful of police in the country are now armed with facial recognition glasses that aid in identifying people suspected or wanted for a crime.