ROBOT JANITOR SHOT BY POLICE

Palo Alto: On Tuesday, July 7, a robot named Sam went on a rampage through the University of Emmetsburg Electrical Engineering building, sending students and professors fleeing for their safety. The reign of terror lasted three hours, ending only when a police sharpshooter put a bullet through the robot's brain.

     "Sam" is a three foot tall robot that looks like a cross between a street sweeper and an industrial coffee machine. The name is a contraction of "samovar", a reference to the ten gallon water heater it contains, which it uses to wash the floors. Normally, Sam moves at 1-1/2 miles per hour, following a pre-programmed route through the halls of the U of E Engineering building. His motion and sound sensors allow him to locate garbage and dodge pedestrians. A set of docking stations placed throughout the building allow him to dump trash, refill his water and fuel tanks, and recharge his batteries as necessary.

     But something apparently went wrong with Sam's control system. After stopping to turn a corner as normal, Sam performed his regular 90-degree pivot only to suddenly accelerate from his normal speed of a slow walk to a 15 mile per hour sprint.

     David Hass, a professor in the U of E Engineering Department, is one of the people responsible for keeping Sam in operation. "Fifteen miles an hour my not sound like much," he says, "but it's a lot faster than the average person can run. When something's coming at you, moving faster than you can, and you know it's carrying about eighty pounds of scalding-hot water, it's pretty scary."

     For more than an hour, Sam raced through the engineering building, skidding around corners and crashing into walls as the staff and students tried to bring him back under control. "We put things in his way to trip him or slow him down, but they didn't work," says Hass. "We spent a lot of time thinking of ways he could get stuck when we designed him, and tried to make him as robust as possible." Hass also admits that the traps set for Sam were too simple for their 250-pound self-propelled coffee machine.

     "There were plenty of ways we could have taken Sam out of service if we were willing to completely destroy him, but we wanted to do as little damage as possible."

     After an hour of watching Sam dodge traps, and smash through improvised barricades, Hass finally called in the authorities. The police department dispatched an officer with a rifle with orders to bring Sam down.

     "It was a fairly basic piece of shooting," says Sergeant Ray Klindt. "By the time I got there, they'd cleared the building and tipped over a desk to give me a firing position. Frankly, it was a lot like hunting from a deer blind."

     A few minutes after Sergeant Klindt had taken position behind the temporary barricade, Sam rounded the corner and put yet another dent in the wall. As Sam backed up to complete his turn, the Sergeant fired a bullet through the controls of his drive system, bringing him to a halt at last.

     Professor Hass praised the officer's shooting. "It was exactly what we hoped for," he says. "It wiped out some of the mechanical systems, but those are easy to fix. Our real concern was to find out why Sam suddenly changed speeds. The systems responsible for that are still intact, and we're going to study them very carefully before we put him back in service."

     Dr. Hass expects Sam to be back to work mopping floors within the next month. In the meantime, janitorial services will be taken over by the regular human staff.

     "The union filed a complaint a couple years ago, when we first put Sam in service, but by now they've gotten used to letting him take care of the boring, day to day work," says Hass. "The first thing the regular janitor asked when the officer let us back in the building was, 'When do you think the little guy will be back on his wheels?'"

     Dr. Hass says his staff plans to make several upgrades for Sam's next incarnation, not the least of which will be a remote-control OFF switch.