A livestreamer’s $4,900 robot allegedly groped a teenager in Germany
Police seized the machine and two phones, saying they still don’t know whether a person was steering it when it touched her.
Just before midnight on October 10, 2026, a red-and-gold humanoid robot, dressed up in a fake mustache and a gold chain, approached a 16-year-old girl at the corner of Palmstraße and Hohenzollernring, a nightlife strip in Cologne, Germany.
It touched her buttocks and made repeated thrusting motions toward her while two of her friends, ages 17 and 18, stood nearby. The robot’s 16-year-old owner, from the nearby town of Wegberg, and a 19-year-old companion filmed the encounter and streamed it live on social media.
Cologne police later found the robot in the trunk of a car and seized it, along with both suspects’ phones. A police spokesman, Christoph Bermel, told reporters investigators are checking whether the robot’s movements were preprogrammed or controlled in real time. No charges had been filed as of this week; officers are examining the case under Germany’s sexual-harassment and unauthorized-recording laws, a German legal-news outlet reported.
We have not been aware of this phenomenon so far.
One of the suspects later told followers on social media that the robot “accidentally collided with” one of the girls while trying to avoid another passerby. Television coverage in the US reported that longer footage from the same livestream appeared to show deliberate, repeated movements instead.
The robot was a version of Unitree’s R1, a Chinese-made humanoid line the company sells directly to the public starting around $4,900, before tax and shipping, a US technology publication and the same US coverage reported. At that price, it is one of the few humanoid robots a private buyer can simply order online rather than lease through a research or pilot program.
The base R1 this site carries sits at Level II, and every mission it is documented performing is operator-initiated and scripted, with no route-planning or task-planning software published for it. That describes the product line Unitree sells, not the specific unit in Cologne, which investigators have not yet traced to a control method.
A German IT-law and robot-ethics researcher told the same legal-news outlet that it may not matter, for who is held responsible, whether a person steered the robot in the moment or wrote its movements into a script beforehand. Either way, she said, a human decision put it where it ended up.
