Autonomous robot struck by self driving Tesla

Gavin Kale, Reporter

A Tesla has hit a robot! Is there a secret war between artificial intelligence we don’t know about? Well, sorry to let you down, but no. That would be pretty cool, though.

 In Las Vegas, just outside of the Consumer Electronics Show, a robot was going around, minding its business. When suddenly, a Tesla Model S in self-driving mode sideswiped the unsuspecting robot. The robot fell on its side, and couldn’t get up. The robot came from a company called Promobot. The robot is likely to need somewhere around $25,000 in repairs, said Promobot’s chief business development officer Oleg Komogortsev.

  There was only a single passenger in the Tesla Model S. Of course, the Tesla was in self-driving mode because no one is that bad of a driver. Promobot was not very upset at Tesla for the slaughtering of this poor, innocent robot by the hands of a Tesla Model S. Promobot tweeted at Elon Musk, founder and CEO of Tesla, “Look @elonmusk at a Tesla Model S hitting and killing a guiltless robot in Vegas. Your car was under a full self-driving mode.” Clearly, they meant this as just a goof at them and did not mean anything serious.

  However, this should raise some alarms at Tesla. It means that the Model S, or at least the one that hit the robot, could use some work with its sensors of detecting people or things around the car, and stopping or turning when there is something there. Hopefully, Tesla can fix this problem and make sure that this doesn’t happen again, as an actual person could be the next victim of this.

  Security cameras, or maybe what could be a dash cam, at the Consumer Electronics Show caught the Tesla Model S hitting the robot. The robot gets sideswiped by the Tesla Model S and falls over on its side. A security guard runs across the street to help out the fallen robot and realizes that he can’t do much by himself, seeing as he might break the robot even more if he tried to get it up.