Rent A Robot Security Guard for $6.25 an Hour

Creating quite a buzz among robotics enthusiasts and media outlets, a number of robotic security guards recently toured Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus during an industry event.

Today, the bots’ makers announced that the success of their first rounds of funding — which raised over $5 million — will allow the company to put their automatons to work patrolling other Silicon Valley campuses in the near future.

Robotics firm Knightscope said, including converted funds from its seed round, it has raised an oversubscribed $5.2 million in Series A financing. In a press release, the company noted that the investment will help to accelerate its deployments of robotic security services in Silicon Valley while “aggressively” continuing technology development.

Knightscope’s autonomous data machines (ADMs) are autonomous robots with an array of surveillance sensors for monitoring various security conditions, each unit being capable of generating over 90 terabytes of data per year. In addition to wirelessly relaying surveillance data to Knightscope Security Operations Centers (KSOC) and providing real-time alerts to human staff, the robots offer a “physical and commanding presence in public places where security is needed,” the company explained.

Knightscope’s first machine, the K5, is now being made available via preorder on a MaaS (Machine-as-a-Service) rental basis. Select customers in Silicon Valley will be able to rent the ADMs for 24/7 deployments over one-, two-, or three-year terms, with a per-machine rental rate of $6.25 per hour. According to Knightscope, deploying K5 machines around outdoor corporate environments, data centers, shopping malls, and where private security guards are stationed “will free humans to address strategic tasks while the machines handle the monotonous, computationally heavy and sometimes dangerous tasks.”

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