Police Robot: From Radio Cars to ABB Safety Lessons

A police robot used to mean a tracked machine with a gripper sent towards a suspect bag. The term now covers egg-shaped patrol robots in car parks, robot dogs and, if Singapore keeps to its plan, humanoid robots working next to officers from 2028. This post traces how policing picked up machines, from radio patrol cars to bomb squad robots and the first mall security robots, and then looks at the Singapore centre that opened in September 2026. It ends with what ABB has learned about keeping robots safe around people, through SafeMove and cobot design, and what that means for robots on public streets.

A Knightscope K5 robot and a Ford Crown Victoria at a petrol station in San Francisco, 2018. Photo: Dllu / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How policing picked up its first machines

For most of the twentieth century, police technology meant cars, radios and call boxes. Detroit police began dispatching patrol cars by radio in 1928, and other forces followed through the 1930s. Photos of the Helsinki police from 1937 and 1938 show a new radio telephone car, its aerial equipment packed into a large box at the back, and an officer logging messages at a radio desk beside a city map. Officers still did the watching, walking and talking themselves, and the radio simply got them to a scene faster and let them report back.

A Helsinki police officer logging messages at a radio desk beside a city map, May 1938. Photo: Hugo Sundström / Finnish Heritage Agency via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

The first robots in police hands came from bomb disposal. The British Army's Wheelbarrow, built in 1972 for Northern Ireland, set the pattern of a remote vehicle with a camera and an arm, and police bomb squads around the world bought similar machines, as our post on bomb disposal robots describes. In July 2016 Dallas police used one of these robots to carry an explosive charge to a gunman who had shot officers. It was the first known case of US police using a robot to kill a suspect.

An Israeli Police bomb disposal robot checking a suspicious bag at a street corner, 2010. Photo: Levg / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Patrol robots came out of the private security market. Knightscope, founded in 2013, showed its K5 robot in 2014: a 1.5 metre dome on wheels, packed with cameras and sensors, that rolls around car parks and malls. In July 2016 a K5 at the Stanford Shopping Center knocked over a toddler, which made plain how carefully a robot moving among the public has to be designed. In May 2017 Dubai Police put a robot built on PAL Robotics' REEM humanoid into service at Dubai Mall, where people could report crimes and pay fines on its chest touch screen.

A Knightscope K5 security robot on stage at the Launch Festival in San Francisco, February 2014. Photo: JD Lasica / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Humanoids join the Home Team in Singapore

Singapore has tested robots on its streets for years. In September 2021 the Home Team Science and Technology Agency (HTX) ran a three week trial of its Xavier patrol robot in Toa Payoh Central. It looked for behaviour such as smoking in prohibited areas and illegal hawking and sent alerts to a control centre. The NYPD tried a Knightscope K5 in the Times Square subway station from October 2023, with less luck. Officers had to chaperone it, it could not use stairs, and by February 2024 it had been retired to storage.

A Knightscope K5 security robot patrolling the entrance of a parking garage in San Francisco, 2019. Photo: Yngvadottir / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

On 30 September 2026 Second Minister for Home Affairs Edwin Tong opened the Home Team Humanoid Robotics Centre (H2RC) at one-north. Some 100 million dollars has been committed to the centre, which HTX runs, and humanoid robots are to work alongside Home Team officers in real operations by 2028. Planned jobs include hazmat work and ambulance resupply for the Singapore Civil Defence Force, post-blast investigations for the police and prison cell searches. "The robot takes on the routine, physically demanding or the dangerous work," Tong said, while officers focus on work that needs empathy and judgement.

A Unitree G1 humanoid robot at a 2024 expo, the kind of small humanoid now being trained for public safety work. Photo: Sayanesy / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

The 29,000 square foot centre has a mock post-blast scene with debris, replicas of industrial pipes and valves, motion capture and teleoperation areas, and an overhead system that keeps humanoids from falling during tests. Partners include ST Engineering, Mistral AI, Field AI and General Robotics. ABB does not build police robots, and a police humanoid is a long way from a factory arm. The safety question is familiar to ABB, though. Its SafeMove software watches a robot's speed and position and slows or stops it when a person comes too close.

The ABB Flexley Mover P604, which finds its way with 3D visual SLAM. Photo: ABB

What police robots still have to prove

Over the next few years more robots will probably move into public safety, mostly for dangerous or dull jobs. Dubai Police used Micropolis Robotics' DPR2 autonomous patrol vehicles to lead a cycling race in October 2026, and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to buy four Boston Dynamics robot dogs. Any patrol robot needs the kind of sensing ABB already uses in factories, where the GoFa cobot stops on contact and Flexley Mover robots find their way with visual SLAM. Our post on humanoid pilots looks at how far humanoids still have to go.

ABB's GoFa cobot is guided by hand and stops when it senses contact. Photo: ABB

Cost and safety will set the pace. Singapore is spending heavily because its workforce is ageing and the Home Team competes with every other sector for the same small pool of recruits, and smaller forces would struggle to justify a similar sum. A humanoid that climbs stairs, opens doors and handles evidence also has to stay safe when it falls or loses its connection. Industrial robot safety rules were written for fenced cells and for cobots on a factory floor, and crowds in a station are a different problem.

A REEM humanoid by PAL Robotics from 2010, the robot model Dubai Police adapted in 2017, at the MNACTEC museum in Terrassa. Photo: Enric / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Trust may be the hardest part. Most people seem fine with a robot that checks a suspect parcel and much less comfortable with one that films them in a station or carries a weapon. For households, police robots raise questions about cameras, data and who is accountable when a machine gets something wrong, which our post on home security robots also touches on. Singapore says it wants robots that support officers, with people keeping the decisions that need judgement.

ABB's mobile YuMi concept, a dual arm robot on a wheeled base, in a hospital lab corridor. Photo: ABB

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