Thailand Introduces AI Police Robot with Facial Recognition

Thailand has introduced its first AI-powered police robot, “AI Police Cyborg 1.0,” during the Songkran festival in Nakhon Pathom. Developed by the Royal Thai Police alongside regional authorities, the humanoid robot is designed for public safety surveillance using facial recognition and behavioral analysis.

The robot is mounted on a platform with wheels and has three wide-angle cameras in its head and body. It collects video from nearby CCTV cameras and drones. Using its built-in AI, it looks for threats such as violence, unauthorized entry, or hidden weapons. Importantly, the system is trained to ignore harmless objects like water guns, common during the festival.

Facial recognition technology authorizes the robot to scan individuals in real time and cross-check them with law enforcement databases. When a match is detected, notifications are promptly dispatched to a provincial Command and Control Centre for swift action.

This deployment follows Thailand’s broader push toward biometric monitoring, including a recent initiative to track undocumented migrant workers. Although the authorities promote these systems as an entry to smarter policing, critics have raised issues of privacy, excessive surveillance, and the absence of legal barriers against the misuse of individual data within the jurisdiction of the existing data protection law, the PDPA, Thailand.

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