Robots taking over traffic

By: Dori Jenkins

Huge robots have invaded the whole city of Kinshasa, but they’re not there to cause trouble. The robots are there to lend a helping hand by directing traffic.  Kinshasa is the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country in Africa. Last month, the city’s government installed three eight foot tall robots, named Tamuke, Mwaluke, and Kisanga, at busy street intersections. Along with them are two other robots from 2013.        
Each robot is equipped with surveillance cameras and traffic lights. These machines are being used in the place of police officers to watch for drivers who don’t follow the rules of the road. This should help make the streets safer for pedestrians and people who break the law. Kinshasa is a huge city with a serious traffic safety problem. About nine million people live there and its bustling streets are crammed with cars whose drivers often fail to obey traffic laws. In the past eight years, more than 2,000 people have died in road accidents in the city. Officials hope drivers will pay more attention to the hard-to-miss robots, resulting in less dangerous streets. A sophomore at Seckman High School, Caitlin Renwick, says, “As a new driver, I personally would feel safer knowing that there was an extra set of eyes watching as people drive and it will hopefully lower the amount of accidents that occur.”                                                                  
To monitor traffic, each solar-powered bot has video cameras in its eyes. The cameras record footage and transmit it to a police station, where officers review the information. If the police catch a driver breaking the law, they then issue him/her a ticket. The robots also have traffic lights in their hands, and their bodies rotate to signal when it’s safe for cars and people on foot to cross intersections.
What do Kinshasa’s human police officers think of their state-of-the-art counterparts? “These robots will be an important asset [something of value] for the police,” Celestin Kanyama, one of the leaders of Kinshasa’s police force, told the news agency.
The team that designed the robots is an association of Congolese female engineers. They have created another five of the machines for use in other parts of the country. The group would like to build 30 additional robots, with each one costing around $27,500 to make. A junior at Seckman High School, Kaci Reed, says, “I think that it would be much cheaper to just put cameras on the light posts instead of making that expensive of a robot to just do the same thing that a camera would.”                                                                                                                    
So far, people seem pleased with the robocops. “As a motorcyclist, I’m very happy with the robot’s work,” a Kinshasa man named Demouto Mutombo told a local news team.