Robot Uprising Reported in Hoboken, NJ Parking Garage

This is getting to be old news, but we're here to document as well as report. It looks like some primitive robots recently attempted a coup.

The robot that parks cars at the Garden Street Garage in Hoboken, New Jersey, trapped hundreds of its wards last week for several days. But it wasn't the technology car owners had to curse, it was the terms of a software license.
...
In the course of a contract dispute, the city of Hoboken had police escort the Robotic employees from the premises just a few days before the contract between both parties was set to expire. What the city didn't understand or perhaps concern itself with, is that they sent the company packing with its manuals and the intellectual property rights to the software that made the giant robotic parking structure work.
Continue reading...

Here we have a company employing humans in a role superior to robots. Then by virtue of an "intellectual property mishap" concerning some robot-control software, the garage ceases to function. It sounds more like the robots went on strike, somehow keenly "aware" at some level that the implications of their actions might cause harm to their human masters...

Artist's rendering of the usually docile Robotic Parking RPS20W, prior to the unseemly incident in Hoboken. Image courtesy Robotic Parking.



Thanks to Wired via BoingBoing