The Knightscope K5, a five foot, two wheeled surveillance robot, patrolled a Dublin parking garage for about ten months before police pulled it.
The Dublin, Ohio Police Department retired its autonomous security robot in May 2026 after the machine made zero arrests, zero tickets, and zero criminal cases across roughly ten months of parking-garage patrol, the Columbus Dispatch reported.
The unit, a Knightscope K5 nicknamed DubBot, stands about five feet tall, weighs roughly 400 pounds, and runs on two wheels with 360-degree cameras and an emergency call button. In marketing photos and in the Dublin parking garage, the machine reads less like a beat cop and more like a five-foot, glowing traffic cone. Dublin paid $67,548 for the single robot under a pilot that originally contemplated two units over two years for $238,440. The second robot was never deployed.
Actual program spend landed at $128,080, and Knightscope is reimbursing Dublin $60,533. That is a vendor acknowledgment that the machine did not deliver what the city was sold, and it puts the net cost of the pilot at roughly $67,500 for a unit that produced no measurable public-safety outcome.
Per a Dublin Police spokesperson, the K5 produced no arrests, no tickets, no criminal cases, and no incidents requiring a human police response during its deployment in a parking garage it had patrolled since July 2025, the Dispatch added. The city told the paper it ended the pilot to "better align with operational needs," which in plain terms means the robot was not pulling its weight on the beat.
Dublin is not the first city to retire a Knightscope K5 within months of deployment. The New York Police Department rolled out K5 units in the New York City subway system in 2023 under Mayor Eric Adams, The New York Times reported, and pulled the units within months as they required human chaperones to operate in a transit environment.
San Antonio International Airport ran its own K5 trial from September to October 2024. The San Antonio Express-News reported, citing open-records emails and airport official Ryan Rocha, that the robot was shipped back to California by April 2025 amid technical problems: it could not drive straight, its live video and audio feed were unreliable, and its badge-reading function failed. Three city council members had voted against the lease over privacy concerns. The airport paid $1,750 a month on a cancellable contract and ran the unit without facial recognition or stored video.
Taken together, the three deployments describe a vendor pattern rather than a one-off. Knightscope, a California-based firm, has spent years pitching the K5 as public-safety infrastructure. The repeated deploy-then-retire cycle, paired with the Dublin reimbursement, suggests the machine is surveillance equipment marketed as a police force multiplier. Cities are now negotiating the terms of that pitch in real time.
What to watch next is whether other municipalities in active Knightscope contracts negotiate the same partial-reimbursement language Dublin secured, and whether any of them publish outcome data such as arrests prevented, incidents flagged, or response times changed. Dublin's number is now on the record. The rest of the K5 fleet has yet to produce one.