On Q Professional Investigations

The night watchman of the future is 5 feet tall, weighs 300 pounds and looks a lot like R2-D2 — without the whimsy. And will work for $6.25 an hour.

A company in California has developed a mobile robot, known as the K5 Autonomous Data Machine, as a safety and security tool for corporations, as well as for schools and neighborhoods.

“We founded Knightscope after what happened at Sandy Hook,” said William Santana Li, a co-founder of that technology company, now based in Sunnyvale, Calif. “You are never going to have an armed officer in every school.”

But what is for some a technology-laden route to safer communities and schools is to others an entry point to a post-Orwellian, post-privacy world.

“This is like R2-D2’s evil twin,” said Marc Rotenberg, the director of the Electronic Privacy and Information Center, a privacy rights group based in Washington.

And the addition of such a machine to the labor market could force David Autor, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist, to rethink his theory about how technology wrecks the middle class.

The minimum wage in the United States is $7.25, and $8 in California. Coming in substantially under those costs, Knightscope’s robot watchman service raises questions about whether artificial intelligence and robotics technologies are beginning to assault both the top and the bottom of the work force as well.

The K5 is the work of Mr. Li, a former Ford Motor Company executive, and Stacy Dean Stephens, a former police officer in Texas. They gained some attention in June for their failed attempt to manufacture a high-tech police cruiser at Carbon Motors Corporation in Indiana.

Knightscope plans to trot out K5 at a news event on Thursday — a debut that is certain to touch off a new round of debate, not just about the impact of automation, but also about how a new generation of mobile robots affects privacy.

The co-founders have chosen to position K5 not as a job killer, but as a system that will upgrade the role of security guard, even if fewer humans are employed.

“We want to give the humans the ability to do the strategic work,” said Mr. Li in a recent telephone interview, describing a highly skilled analyst who might control a herd of security robots.

The robot, which can be seen in a promotional video, is still very much a work in progress. The system will have a video camera, thermal imaging sensors, a laser range finder, radar, air quality sensors and a microphone. It will also have a limited amount of autonomy, such as the ability to follow a preplanned route. It will not, at least for now, include advanced features like facial recognition, which is still being perfected.

Knightscope settled in Silicon Valley because it was hoping for a warm reception from technology companies that employ large security forces to protect their sprawling campuses.

There are about 1.3 million private security guards in the United States, and they are low paid for the most part, averaging about $23,000 a year, according to the Service Employees International Union. Most are not unionized, so they are vulnerable to low-cost automation alternatives.

K5 also raises questions about mass surveillance, which has already set off intense debate in the United States and Europe with the expansion of closed-circuit television systems on city streets and elsewhere. The Knightscope founders, however, have a radically different notion, which involves crime prediction, or “precog” — a theme of the movie “Minority Report.”

“We have a different perspective,” Mr. Li said. “We don’t want to think about ‘RoboCop’ or ‘Terminator,’ we prefer to think of a mash up of ‘Batman,’ ‘Minority Report’ and R2-D2.”

Mr. Li envisions a world of K5 security bots patrolling schools and communities, in what would amount to a 21st-century version of a neighborhood watch. The all-seeing mobile robots will eventually be wirelessly connected to a centralized data server, where they will have access to “big data,” making it possible to recognize faces, license plates and other suspicious anomalies.

Mr. Rotenberg said such abilities would rapidly encroach on traditional privacy rights.

“There is a big difference between having a device like this one on your private property and in a public space,” he said. “Once you enter public space and collect images and sound recordings, you have entered another realm. This is the kind of pervasive surveillance that has put people on edge.”

Mr. Li said he believed he could circumvent those objections by making the data produced by his robots available to anyone in a community with access to the Internet.

“As much as people worry about Big Brother, this is as much about putting the technology in the hands of the public to look back,” he said. “Society and industry can work together on this issue.”

This is essentially a reprise of the debate over Google’s Street View system, which has drawn opposition from privacy advocates. But while Google’s cars captured still images infrequently, a pervasive video and audio portal that autonomously patrolled a neighborhood would in effect be a real-time Street View system.

For the moment, the system is unarmed, and it is certain to become the target of teenagers who will undoubtedly get a thrill from knocking the robot over. Mr. Li said he believed this was not an insurmountable challenge, given the weight, size and video-recording ability of the bots.

Mr. Rotenberg said a greater challenge would be community opposition. He acknowledged, however, that K5’s looks were benign enough. “It doesn’t look like Arnold Schwarzenegger,” he said. “Unless he was rolled over and pressed into a ball.”

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TUCSON — The two girls, ages 12 and 13, were barefoot and trembling as they pounded on a neighbor’s door shortly before 4 a.m. Tuesday. The couple inside were shocked when the girls told them they had been imprisoned in a home across the way.

A day later, that neighbor was still at a loss.

“I didn’t even know there were children living in that home,” Phillip said. He and his wife, Alice, who declined to give their last name, helped the girls calm down and then called police, though the sisters had begged them to instead phone their grandmother.

Tucson police Wednesday said three sisters — the oldest is 17 — had been confined to their bedrooms for months, where music or a static sound played at all hours and surveillance cameras were pointed at their beds 24 hours a day.

Sometimes they weren’t allowed to go to the bathroom, forced to relieve themselves in their bedroom closets, police said.

Authorities said the family moved into the Tucson neighborhood in August, but the girls said they had been imprisoned for up to two years in previous homes.

Sophia and Fernando Richter, the girls’ mother and stepfather, were taken into custody shortly after police arrived and were booked into Pima County Jail.

The stepfather, 34, was arrested on suspicion of kidnapping, emotional child abuse, physical child abuse and sexual abuse with a person under 15 years of age. The mother, 32, was arrested on suspicion of kidnapping, emotional child abuse and physical child abuse. A judge set their bail at $100,000 and $75,000, respectively. They did not enter pleas.

Phillip, the neighbor, said he and his wife opened the door only because the girls were so distraught. “They kept saying their stepfather had a knife and tried to break into their room,” he said. “They were also afraid that the mother was going to be killed by their stepfather.”

The girls, who told police they had escaped the single-story suburban home through an alarmed bedroom window, appeared unkempt and smelled of urine and body odor, Phillip said. He also said the girls were worried about their older sister because she was still in the house.

When officers responded to the Richter home, they found the 17-year-old in a locked bedroom with loud hip-hop music blaring from speakers facing the bed.

“I can tell you that the music was so loud that she had no idea what was going on around there,” Tucson Police Chief Roberto Villaseñor said at a news conference Wednesday. “She was totally surprised to see police there.”

Phillip said he heard loud music whenever the couple were out but had figured they wanted to make it appear someone was home so nobody would break in.

The 17-year-old kept a satchel around her neck with a small calendar where she documented in detail the number of days she had been confined and the food she had consumed, Villaseñor said, adding that the girls were fed once or twice a day and were kept in filthy living conditions.

An elaborate alarm system had been attached to the two bedroom doors, and vents were shuttered with duct tape. The space between the bedroom doors and the floor were blocked off with some sort of cloth.

“It seemed to be a way of soundproofing the rooms,” Tucson Police Sgt. Chris Widmer said.

Villaseñor said the locks to the bedrooms were from the inside and, except for the alarm system, it appeared the girls could have opened the doors on their own.

“But something kept them from doing that,” he said. “Until you’ve been in those shoes, you really can’t understand. … I will say that they did do things that made these girls feel isolated and made real sure that they didn’t feel like they were in control.”

Villaseñor said the two bedrooms were monitored with security cameras and that the girls had to signal to the camera if they needed to use the bathroom. A parent would escort each to the bathroom and back through a hallway where a barrier blocked the view to the rest of the house.

There were also times when they were not allowed to use the bathroom, Villaseñor said. Investigators found jars of what appeared to be human waste along with piles of clothes contaminated with urine inside a closet.

Relatives never visited because they believed the family was living in San Diego, police said, noting that the mother had a cellphone number with a San Diego area code.

Villaseñor said the girls had not attended school for the last two years, though their mother said they had been home-schooled. Phillip said one of the girls told him, “We’re not allowed to go to school.” The neighbor described the girls as polite and articulate.

The three girls are in a group home for now. “We didn’t want to separate them,” Villaseñor said. “We made sure they are together.”

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