Robotics has moved boldly into new fields, with machines now folding clothes, delivering towels, and offering advice on the best Italian restaurant near a hotel. Now a Silicon Valley company has created a robotics business around an area of growing importance for many organizations: site security.

“We take the good things that humans do, which is make strategic decisions, the good things that machines provide, which includes doing the maintenance work and storing data for a very long time, and we combine those to try to help with crime,” said Mercedes Soria (pictured), vice president of software engineering at Knightscope Inc.

Soria stopped by theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and spoke with host Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick) at SiliconANGLE’s studio in Palo Alto, California. They discussed how Knightscope’s robots protect a variety of different environments, the service model available to customers, and Soria’s career path to her current work in Silicon Valley.

Cameras identify people

Knightscope’s security robots cover a wide range of environments, from hospitals and data centers to shopping malls and parking lots. The camera-equipped robots have machine learning algorithms that let the automated sentries correctly identify whether there are people in an image. As the robot gathers information, data is constantly fed back to a human-controlled security operations center for monitoring and evaluation.

The company has helped customers reduce crime in parking lots where car break-ins are an issue and in shopping areas where merchandise theft is a constant concern. Knightscope’s ability to record video and match images to previous files has helped some stores deter repeat offenders. “By seeing who these people are and determining that they came back to the mall, we were able to apprehend them as criminals,” Soria explained.

Knightscope’s business model leverages a “robotics as a service” model where customers are more likely to accept renting the company’s robots for approximately $10 per hour with regular upgrades versus paying more than $100,000 to purchase one outright. “We decided from the beginning that we wanted to own the whole technology stack,” Soria said. “We wanted to be the Apple of security guards.”

Knightscope’s vice president came to the country as an immigrant, thanks to an exchange program between her school in Ecuador and an American university. “When you’re in South America and somebody tells you there’s an opportunity to go study in the U.S., you take that opportunity,” Soria concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CubeConversations.

Photo: SiliconANGLE