PATRICIA DE MELO MOREIRA/AFP via Getty Images
The world is inching closer and closer to the vision painted by the science fiction movies where humans coexist with robots that frequently mingle in our midst. However, there are plenty of people who aren’t prepared for that reality, including one woman in Macau who was sent to the hospital after being startled by a humanoid machine that was taken into police custody as a result.
It’s been a few decades since Boston Dynamics started triggering people’s “Robot Apocalypse” alarms with the increasingly sophisticated machines that seemed poised to usher in a world where they’d be capable of shouldering a wide variety of tasks that humans have traditionally attended to.
Since then, a ton of other companies have gotten in on the action while unveiling some impressive engineering feats of their own, and advancements in autonomous technology and artificial intelligence have teased a future where robots are no longer a novelty.
However, there are still plenty of issues to work out when it comes to the machines themselves and their presence in everyday life, as evidenced by an incident that led to an unsuspecting elderly woman landing in the hospital.
Police in Macau detained a robot that startled a woman who was hospitalized due to shock
There have been more than a few situations that highlight the current shortcomings of robots and other vehicles that rely on autonomous technology to get around.
That includes the food delivery robots that have invaded crime scenes and destroyed property in Los Angeles, as well as the Waymo cars that have caused traffic jams and even prevented an ambulance from responding to a mass shooting.
You might think the chance of a robot-related incident unfolding is lower when it’s being powered by an actual human being, but that was not the case with what went down on the streets of Macau last week.
According to the Macau Post Daily, a local tutoring service called the Study Hard Education Centre was using a robot to drum up attention for the business on the evening of March 12 when it approached a 70-year-old woman who had stopped on the street to look at her phone.
A video captured her chastizing the robot (which was being remotely controlled by a man who worked for the education center) after it caught her off guard, and police got involved before “detaining” the robot that was escorted from the scene.
The First Humanoid Robot Arrested by Police🤖👮♀️
One night in Macau, a citizen was taking a walk with his humanoid robot (Unitree G1).
A passing woman yelled at him (perhaps frightening her), essentially saying, “Why bother with this when there are so many other things to do?… pic.twitter.com/moCBhsDeRW
— CyberRobo (@CyberRobooo) March 7, 2026
The machine didn’t make any physical contact with the woman, but the interaction reportedly stressed her out to the point where she was taken to the hospital and held overnight for observation. She declined to pursue charges after being discharged with a clean bill of health, but the employee who was operating the robot was warned to “avoid endangering or frightening pedestrians” in the future.