I thought bomb squads used robots to extract explosives in a safe manner. When said robot drops potentially live grenades AND THEN RUNS OVER THEM with its treads, I don’t think the robot is doing a very good job.
The robot was put into action by the San Francisco PD yesterday when they discovered the grenades in a garage. If you skip to the 2:30 mark in the video, you can watch the robot drop a grenade onto the ground, and then at 3:40 you can see its operator direct the bot on top of the grenade, as even the news anchors can’t help but ask, WTF?
The grenades had belonged to a recently deceased man, and his family discovered them while going through his stuff. Fortunately, this fail did not reach epic status, especially since this was next to a bunch of businesses, but this was definitely an exemplary display of incompetence. There’s also a pretty good second opinion on the entire affair here. [YouTube]