Equipped with facial recognition and a companion drone, but are they too cute to fight crime?

Last month we reported that Dubai Police had welcomed the world’s first ‘Robocop’ onto the force, and it looks like they weren’t planning to stop there.

In an announcement made earlier today, they revealed plans to add a number of miniature autonomous patrol cars to an already tech-heavy fleet in an effort to further police the city streets.

The venture is a partnership with Singapore-based company Otsaw Digital, who have built the O-R3 vehicles to include a number of useful crime-fighting features including facial recognition cameras, live video broadcasting and the ability to launch a companion drone from a retractable tray in the rear of the vehicle.

The below video, taken from Otsaw Digital’s YouTube, show’s the (admittedly cute) car in action.

Using 3D mapping technology and an advanced machine learning algorithm, the cars are able to detect objects in their immediate vicinity and successfully navigate around them. Leaving them free to perform the sorts of mundane and undesirable tasks that would otherwise take up human officer’s valuable time.

They’re also clever enough to know when their batteries are running low and head back to base for a top-up.

Dubai Police is planning to roll out the vehicles in tourist destinations around the city by the end of 2017.

Let’s just hope they dress them up with some fangs and racing stripes, otherwise they’re going to have a tough time scaring any criminals being as adorable-looking as they currently are.

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