Cologne police investigate who controlled a robot that allegedly groped a teenage girl

According to the Cologne police statement, a 16-year-old girl was standing with two friends outside a restaurant at the corner of Palmstraße and Hohenzollernring shortly before midnight on the night of October 10-11 ^[2][3]. A red and gold robot about 3 feet 11 inches tall reportedly approached her from behind, touched her buttocks and made thrusting movements against her ^[4].

Police spokesman Christoph Bermel is plain about how new this is to them. "We have not been aware of this phenomenon so far," he told the AP, and he called it "new territory for us" ^[5].

The fork police are working on puts responsibility in different places. If a person was steering, the candidates are the two teenagers already under investigation. If a stored routine was running, someone wrote it or started it, and the reports do not identify the robot's maker or model.

A threat model built around an owner in a living room does not reach a street at midnight. The AP reported that videos posted online show the teenagers walking with the robot at night and, in its words, "hugging others" ^[8].

For anyone who sells or runs a robot that moves among strangers, we'd use a two-by-two. One axis is control: a live operator or a stored routine. The other is reach: the owner alone, or bystanders within arm's length. Put every action the robot can take into a cell. For each cell in the bystander row, write down the name of the person who issued the command and point to the record that shows it. A blank cell means the vendor has no answer to give when police ask. The cost is real, because recording commands takes engineering time and some buyers will object to being recorded. We think that cost is smaller than having no answer. Cologne sits in the bystander row, and police have not yet placed it in either column ^[6].