Dubai Police to get robotic self-driving patrol vehicle with facial recognition

Dubai Police to get robotic self-driving patrol vehicle with facial recognition

Dubai Police’s fleet is no stranger to super cars of all sorts—think Bugatti Veyron, Aston Martin One-77, Mercedes SLS and a host of other names you could salivate over. But the newest entrant expected to join the fleet is a ‘super’ vehicle of a completely different sort: a robotic, self-driving patrol vehicle that comes equipped with thermal imaging, license plate readers and 360 degree cameras with facial recognition! It is a fully autonomous car that navigates through machine learning algorithms and is supposed to function as a mobile surveillance unit. Tiny in size but replete with cutting edge technology, this vehicle named O-R3 (reminds a little of R2D2 and C3PO!) has been built by Singapore-based start-up OTSAW Digital. OTSAW says Dubai will be the first city in the world to use the O-R3 for everyday patrols—but the Dubai Police department have specified that O-R3 will only be used for low level order enforcement tasks and won’t be replacing human officers.