Festival-goers at the Chinese festival, the Spring Festival Gala in Tianjin were sent scrambling when a humanoid robot suddenly lunged toward the crowd on February 9. The shocking video shows the machine breaking from its programmed routine and charging at startled spectators standing behind safety barriers.
Security personnel quickly rushed in, dragging the malfunctioning robot away before anyone could be injured. Festival organizers later downplayed the incident, describing it as a “simple failure” and noting that the robot had passed all previous safety tests. They promised additional precautions would be implemented to prevent similar incidents in the future.
This alarming episode adds to a growing list of robot-related accidents making headlines worldwide. In a particularly disturbing incident at Tesla’s Texas factory, an engineer was pinned down by a manufacturing robot that dug its claws into his back and arm, reportedly leaving “a trail of blood” across the factory floor.
According to an official incident report, another worker had to hit the emergency stop button when the trapped engineer couldn’t free himself. The victim then fell “a couple of feet” down a scrap aluminum chute. Despite sustaining cuts severe enough to leave blood on the factory floor, the engineer apparently didn’t require time off work.
Investigators found that while maintenance was being performed, two of three robots had been properly shut down, but one was accidentally left operational. In yet another unsettling case, surveillance footage from a Shanghai showroom captured what appeared to be a smaller robot named Erbai seemingly “convincing” larger machines to abandon their assigned tasks in what the company dramatically described as a “kidnapping.”
