Little Chubby (Photo : What's on Weibo)
“Little Chubby,” a robot at the 18th China Hi-Tech Fair in Shenzhen, China, smashed a glass booth and hurt a visitor on Thursday, Nov. 17. It is the first time in China that a robot injured a person, although in 2015, a caged robot in Germany killed a worker at a Volkswagen facility.
The robot, made by a tech company in Beijing, was designed for children aged between four and 12 as an educational tool, What’s on Weibo reported. The robot sells for $1,460, or almost 10,000 yuan, on e-commerce websites in China.
Given the serious flaws of Little Chubby, parents might have second thoughts before they would buy the educational robot. Because of the incident, Chinese netizens raised the warning that the invasion of robots have started. One netizen called Little Chubby the Terminator.
The fair, held at the Shenzhen Convention & Exhibition Center, is China’s leading technology event that runs for six days which gathers thousands of the latest technology innovations in the country.
The injured visitor was brought to the hospital for treatment of his wounds, cuts on the ankle from shattered glass caused by the three-foot robot made to teach English to Chinese children, Daily Mail reported. According to the British daily, Little Chubby broke the glass without human commands.
In a statement issued by Evolver, the developer and maker of Little Chubby, said on Friday that a staff pressed a button by mistake which caused the artificial intelligence to reverse rather than move forward. Little Chubby was designed to detect and avoid automatically obstacles, however, that function was shut off during the time the incident happened.
After the mistake, the robot went out of control and sped forward in 10 seconds and broke the glass wall. Evolver said the robot was launched, the company has sold more than 3,000 units of Little Chubby.
