These are physically embodied robots operating at ground level, and they differ from each other more than the shared category suggests. The distinction from autonomous patrol vehicles, covered separately on this site, is that those are driverless cars combining facial recognition and number plate recognition; these are robots.

Boston Dynamics' Spot is a roughly 75-pound four-legged teleoperated robot costing around 100,000 dollars, able to climb stairs and open doors, carrying cameras into environments where sending a person would be dangerous. It is not an autonomous decision-making system: an operator drives it. Massachusetts State Police Bomb Squad operates two units alongside its special tactical operations team, with deployments including a barricaded-suspect shooting scene in Danvers, Boston's Independence Day celebration and the Boston Marathon. The NYPD suspended Spot in 2021 after public backlash, then acquired two units in 2023.

Knightscope's K5 is a self-driving camera-equipped patrol robot. The NYPD leased one at 9 dollars an hour under a seven-month contract worth 12,250 dollars to patrol Times Square subway station accompanied by officers, and retired it after four months, confirming the pilot complete.

In China, Reuters reported in August 2026 that AiMOGA Robotics, a division of Chery, had deployed 110 humanoid police robots across Chinese cities for traffic control and public safety functions, with plans to expand production substantially. This is a materially different proposition from the teleoperated Western deployments: physically embodied robotic agents placed into routine public-safety roles rather than hazardous-environment tools. The evidence is company and news-agency reporting rather than police procurement documentation, so the deployment scale should be treated as a company claim.