Could Your Robot be Spying on You?

Researcher led by the National University of Singapore recently demonstrated that household robot vacuum cleaners can be hacked to behave like listening devices, which spy on their unsuspecting owners. Could industrial robots be similarly compromised? Hackers have exploited LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) scanner technology, as used in the latest iPhone, to turn a household vacuum cleaner into a spying device. If that's not sinister enough, elsewhere, in an experimental stunt, a friendly-looking humanoid robot was hacked to act like Chucky, the evil killer doll from the Child's Play movies. A video shows the robot attacking a tomato while emitting an evil laugh. The latter experiment was designed to demonstrate the vulnerabilities of technologies that can be hacked in an increasingly-connected world.