(Seoul) In South Korea, a robot employed as a municipal official seems to have thrown itself from the top of a staircase, reported Wednesday the town hall which opened an investigation into the reasons for this fall in this country keen on robotics.
For almost a year, this android had been helping residents of the municipality of Gumi, in the center of the country, to carry out administrative tasks, a manager of the municipal team explained to AFP.
He was found last week at the bottom of a staircase, inert.
Just before it fell, witnesses saw the robot “running in circles as if something was there,” the official added, according to whom the cause of the incident is under investigation.
“Parts have been collected and will be analyzed” by the company that designed it, he added.
“He was officially part of the town hall, he was one of us,” lamented another official.
Developed by California-based company Bear Robotics, the robot worked from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. and had its 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 local press picked up on the subject, with some headlines asking, on their front pages, “why this hard-working civil servant acted in this way” or if “the work was too hard for the robot”.
South Korea is among the world’s leading robotics nations. It has the highest density of robots in the world, with one android for every ten employees, according to the International Federation of Robotics.
