A couple brought military explosive devices into a Los Angeles Police Department station Saturday afternoon in an attempt to dispose of them, spurring officials to temporarily evacuate the Pacoima station and nearby homes. The incident came less than two weeks after an explosion killed three Los Angeles County sheriff's detectives -- the deadliest incident for the Sheriff's Department in more than 150 years. The three agency veterans who were killed were Dets. On Saturday, according to the LAPD, two people came into the Pacoima station at 2:30 p.m. and said they had been cleaning out the home of a family member who recently died when they found what they believed were explosives. The department's bomb squad used a robot to take images of the plastic box the couple had brought, which had "several military ordnances inside."

A robot dog named'Spot' designed to sniff out bombs went into'sit mode' and refused to move during a live trial by Massachusetts police. Spot was created by Boston Dynamics and was on loan to the bomb squad in 2019 when the failed test happened, according to a report by OneZero. The bomb squad were called to a Walmart in Westboro, Massachusetts after employees spotted a suspicious'old brown briefcase' on a bin in the car park. Officers decided to have Spot examine the briefcase but when they turned him on he went into'sit mode' and wouldn't move - even after multiple reboots. Massachusetts Police were eventually able to get Spot to walk over to the briefcase but the video quality he recorded'wasn't very good' and had to sent a human technician to remove the briefcase - it didn't have a bomb inside.

Last week in the New Mexico desert, military and civilian bomb squads faced off at the 12th annual Robot Rodeo, which is a week of intense training organized by Sandia National Laboratories. To test their skills, bomb squads steered their bots to enter downed planes, explore faux-radioactive disaster sites, and climb flights of stairs. "Everybody else is running away from the bomb, and these guys are going in," says Jake Deuel, robotics manager at Sandia and coordinator of the rodeo. His goal is for the event to help bomb squads tackle real-world situations and learn what their robots can and cannot do. "We train these guys to come home safe," he says.

Rio de Janeiro's police force, like the rest of the city's public services, is broke. In the headquarters of the bomb-disposal unit, supplies of everything from soap to explosives are running out as the city struggles to pay its debts amid Brazil's deep recession. But, poor as it is, Rio's bomb squad is one of the most technologically advanced in South America. In the cramped storeroom of its base in northern Rio, a state-of-the-art robot takes pride of place. "The robot is a fundamental piece of equipment--it's vital to our day-to-day work," says the bomb squad's boss, Marcelo Corrêa.

SYRACUSE, Ind. – Police in northern Indiana are investigating how a grenade came to be next to a Goodwill donation box. Syracuse Police Chief Jim Layne said officers acting on a report from the public found the military-style grenade lying in the grass near the donation box Monday morning. WSBT-TV reports police blocked streets around the area and notified people at businesses and homes in the area to remain indoors. Layne says a bomb squad from Elkhart used a robot to pick up the grenade and place it in a containment vessel for transport to a place where it could be safely destroyed. Layne says the bomb squad believes the grenade was inert.

Dallas Police face questions this morning over the method used to kill the sniper in last week's officer ambush. Police sent a robot armed with explosives to kill the gunman. Robots in the past have stopped a lot of dangerous situations. They can do pretty much anything a person can do: go upstairs, communicate via speakers, and use cameras to explore a scene, and at least one has been deployed to spray tear gas to subdue a suspect. But using a robot to kill?

From New York National Guard: "A bomb disposal robot, piloted from a distance, examines a downed drone with explosive material tethered to it during training." Looks like that bomb was ... frozen in its tracks. Look, I'm not going to beat the lede from the New York National Guard, so here it is in full: The remote-controlled robot bumped across the divots of the grassy field until it reached the downed toy drone. Its camera gazed up and down as it examined the explosive device nearby, in a Taylor Swift lunch box tethered to the drone. The drone, the robot, the lunch box, and the explosive device were part of an exercise called Raven's Challenge.