The first thing to know about a security robot in 2026 is that you almost certainly cannot buy one. Knightscope, the company whose egg-shaped K5 is the machine most people picture, does not sell it. You subscribe, typically for twelve months, and the robot stays on Knightscope's books. Cobalt's indoor robot is offered the same way. So is Asylon's robot dog. The question "how much does a security robot cost?" has a real answer, but it is an hourly rate, and the interesting part is what that hourly rate is being compared with.
The second thing to know is that the record of deployments is now long enough to read. Since 2015, at least 21 public deployments of security robots have been tracked in the US, and at least 13 of them have ended, according to a tally by Proof News. That is not a verdict on the machines. It is a map of what they were asked to do that they could not do, which is more useful than any spec sheet.
Three kinds of machine, three different jobs
"Security robot" covers three product categories that share a name and not much else. Our robot directory lists 31 security units; they sort into wheeled patrol machines for commercial sites, legged and aerial platforms that go where wheels cannot, and small indoor devices sold to households.
Wheeled patrol. The Knightscope K5 is 164 cm tall, weighs about 190 kg and tops out at 3 mph. It carries 360-degree HD cameras, thermal imaging, licence-plate reading and a public-address speaker, and it recharges itself. The K7, announced in November 2025, is the off-road version for fence lines and logistics yards, rated at up to 10 mph; it made its public debut at the GSX trade show this week and, per the company's August results, is in beta with first deployments expected in the fourth quarter of 2026. Cobalt's robot works indoors, in offices and manufacturing plants, and is sold as a service with a human-staffed monitoring centre behind it. SMP Robotics' Argus S5.3 is the outdoor alternative that you can actually purchase outright: rated IP65, eight hours of patrol, thermal vision that spots a person at 150 metres at night.
Legged and aerial. Boston Dynamics' Spot gained a dedicated security-patrol mission type in January 2026: if it detects a person on a patrol, it pauses, lights up, and captures thermal, panoramic and zoomed images before carrying on. Asylon's DroneDog is a Spot with a security payload, thermal and 20x optical cameras, and a self-charging kennel, sold as a managed service with a 24/7 operations centre. Ghost Robotics' Vision 60 is the rugged option, IP67, 51 kg, 3.15 hours of continuous walking, and it is now majority-owned by a Korean defence contractor. At the other end of the price scale, Unitree's Go2 starts at $1,600, and an enterprise build with a lidar package sells through resellers for around $12,000. Drones round out the tier: Nightingale's Blackbird flies 40-minute sorties from a box on the roof, and Sunflower Labs sells a home drone that launches from a hive in the garden.
Home. This is the tier where the interesting story is what has not shipped. Amazon's Astro is still an invitation-only "Day 1 Edition" at $1,599, and the business version was discontinued in September 2024. Ring's flying Always Home Cam, announced in 2020 at $249.99, has still not reached general sale. What you can actually buy is smaller and stranger: Enabot's EBO X, a 1.7 kg rolling camera with a 4K sensor, fall detection and Alexa, for $999, and Moorebot's palm-sized Scout at about $200, currently sold out.
| Machine | Type | Where it works | How you pay | Status, Sept 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Knightscope K5 | Wheeled patrol | Outdoor, car parks, campuses | Subscription, 12-month term | Shipping |
| Knightscope K7 | Wheeled, off-road | Perimeters, yards | Subscription (expected) | Beta; deployments due Q4 2026 |
| Cobalt | Wheeled patrol | Indoor offices, plants | Robot-as-a-service, annual | Shipping |
| SMP Argus S5.3 | Wheeled patrol | Outdoor, IP65 | Purchase or managed service | Shipping |
| Boston Dynamics Spot | Quadruped | Indoor and outdoor | Purchase; $74,500 list in 2020 | Shipping; patrol mode added Jan 2026 |
| Asylon DroneDog | Quadruped + payload | Industrial sites | Managed service | Shipping |
| Ghost Robotics Vision 60 | Quadruped | Outdoor, IP67 | Quote | Shipping |
| Unitree Go2 | Quadruped | Indoor and outdoor | Purchase, from $1,600 | Shipping |
| Nightingale Blackbird | Drone-in-a-box | Outdoor sites | Quote | Shipping |
| Sunflower Labs Bee | Home drone | Residential grounds | Purchase + installation | Shipping since 2022 |
| Amazon Astro | Home rover | Indoor | $1,599, invitation only | Business version discontinued 2024 |
| Ring Always Home Cam | Indoor drone | Indoor, single storey | $249.99, invitation only | Not on general sale |
| Enabot EBO X | Home rover | Indoor | $999 | Shipping |
The full list, with the specs and the vendor's own status line for each unit, is in the security robots directory; the machines you can buy outright are also in Bots For Sale.
What they cost, and what the hourly number hides
Knightscope's own figure is about $11 an hour for a K5, which it sets against the "$35 to $85 an hour typically required for human security guards". Both numbers are the vendor's, and both are doing specific work. Eleven dollars an hour, 24 hours a day, is roughly $96,000 a year per robot. The city of Dublin, Ohio, paid just over $128,000 for two K5s that ran from July 2025 to May 2026, which lands in the same place.
The $35 to $85 is a contracted, fully loaded rate for a guard supplied by a security firm, with the firm's margin, insurance, scheduling and supervision folded in. The guard does not see most of it. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median wage for the country's 1.3 million security guards at $18.29 an hour, or $38,050 a year. A single post staffed around the clock needs a bit more than four full-time people, so even at the median wage a 24/7 post costs about $160,000 a year in pay alone. Against that, the robot's $96,000 looks cheap. Against a single guard on a single eight-hour shift, it does not, because the robot is billed for the sixteen hours nobody asked it to cover.
Cheaper hours are only worth something if they are the hours you needed. That is the whole of the pricing argument, and it is why the deployment record matters more than the rate card.
Elsewhere the pricing is more conventional. Spot's launch list price in 2020 was $74,500 for the base kit, with the autonomy package at $34,570 on top; Boston Dynamics no longer publishes list prices, but in April 2026 Wichita's city council approved $340,000 for one police Spot with its payloads and training, on a four-to-three vote. Sunflower Labs quotes $4 to $7 an hour for its home drone once installed, and notes that most customer flights last about five minutes. The consumer rovers are simply retail products: $999 for the EBO X, $1,599 for an Astro if you are invited to buy one.
| Cost line | Figure | Who says so |
|---|---|---|
| K5 hourly rate | About $11 an hour | Knightscope (vendor claim) |
| Contract guard rate | $35 to $85 an hour | Knightscope (vendor claim) |
| Median guard wage, US | $18.29 an hour; $38,050 a year | Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2025 data |
| Two K5s, ~10 months | Just over $128,000 | City of Dublin, Ohio |
| Subscription term | Typically 12 months | Knightscope quarterly filing |
| Spot base kit | $74,500 (2020 list) | Boston Dynamics, via IEEE Spectrum |
| One police Spot, equipped | $340,000 | Wichita City Council, April 2026 |
| Unitree Go2 | From $1,600; Pro $2,800 | Unitree store |
| Enabot EBO X | $999 | Enabot store |
One more line belongs in any cost discussion, and it is about ownership rather than money. Under Knightscope's terms, the client owns the surveillance video and audio outright, and Knightscope may use it only to deliver and improve the service. But the footage is available for download for two weeks, after which the company may delete it at its discretion. A US veterans' hospital that ran a K5 published its privacy assessment: patrol data stored for 30 days in a government cloud, then permanently removed; licence plates and the Wi-Fi addresses of nearby devices collected; facial recognition switched off. You rent the robot, you own what it sees, and you have a fortnight to decide what to keep. If that arrangement sounds familiar, our piece on on-device AI and who holds the data covers the same shape in home devices.
Where the deployments ended, and what the vendors did next
Dublin, Ohio ended its programme in June 2026 after about ten months. In the city's own account the robots "didn't identify any criminal incidents, tickets, or contribute to any arrests", and the second unit was never deployed at all; the city asked for about $60,000 back. New York's police department ended its Times Square subway pilot in February 2024; the 190 kg robot could not use stairs and needed officers alongside it. A trade-body review in 2024 put the limitation plainly: the machines are "limited to basic tasks, such as patrolling predefined routes and reporting anomalies", with very little ability to interact with people.
None of this is surprising once you ask what a robot on a site is for at three in the morning. Is it there to see, or to do something about what it sees? Every ended deployment in the Proof News tally failed on the second half of that question. A K5 can spot a person in a car park at night and announce itself. It cannot ask them to leave, and the human who can is the cost you were trying to remove.
One line in Knightscope's own filings changes how the whole category reads. Its revenue in the second quarter of 2026 was $9.0 million, up 228 per cent on the same quarter of 2025, and the company now serves 434 clients across 42 states. Most of that growth did not come from robots. In February 2026 the company bought Event Risk, a licensed human security-guard firm, for around $18 million; its headcount went from 90 to more than 400, the guard business supplied most of the first quarter's revenue increase, and the company's gross margin for the second quarter was about 7 per cent. Knightscope now describes its product as an "Autonomous Security Force": machines, software and licensed guards, as it puts it, "as one accountable operation, under one contract". Its auditors also flagged substantial doubt about the company's ability to continue as a going concern in the 2025 annual report, which is the standard language for a firm burning cash faster than it earns it.
Put those two facts side by side and the business makes sense. The robot company did not replace the guards. It hired them. The thing being sold in 2026 is a mixed shift, with a machine that never sleeps doing the watching and a person doing the part that requires hands and judgement, on a single invoice. Cobalt, which was bought in 2024 by an investor who runs a cloud video-surveillance firm, now leads with AI alarm filtering and remote monitoring, with the robot as one sensor among several. Asylon sells DroneDog with an operations centre included. The pattern is the same in each case: the robot is the sensor, the human is the response, and the company owns both.
That also settles the labour question more gently than either the vendor pitch or the "robots are coming for guard jobs" headline. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects security-guard employment growing 1 per cent over the decade to 2035, with about 157,000 openings a year, most of them replacing people who leave. What is changing is the shape of the shift rather than its existence: fewer hours of walking a fence, more hours of answering what a camera saw. Our AI and jobs timeline tracks that kind of reconfiguration across other trades, and the humanoids that have actually shipped tell a similar story about the distance between a demo and a deployment.
Some of this technology does work, and the pattern is specific. Spot-class machines on industrial sites are asked to read gauges, sniff for gas and walk a route that would otherwise need a person in a hazard suit; that is inspection with a security camera attached, and the buyers keep renewing. Drones launched from a box to a reported incident, rather than flown on patrol, reached the scene in 30 to 80 seconds at one university that adopted them this year. The failures cluster where the robot was put in front of the public and expected to behave like a guard. The test Dublin ran by accident is the one worth copying: how many incidents did the robot detect that a fixed camera would have missed, and how many times did a person still have to go?
Frequently asked questions
How much does a security robot cost?
For commercial patrol robots the honest answer is an hourly subscription, because you do not buy the machine. Knightscope's own figure is about $11 an hour for a K5, roughly $96,000 a year running around the clock, on a term that is typically twelve months. Legged robots are bought outright: a Unitree Go2 starts at $1,600, Spot listed at $74,500 in 2020 before payloads, and a fully equipped police Spot cost Wichita $340,000 in 2026. Home devices are ordinary retail, from about $200 for a Moorebot to $999 for the Enabot EBO X. Prices and status for every unit are in our security robots directory.
Can I get a security robot for my home?
Yes, but the choice is narrower than the announcements suggest. Amazon's Astro is still invitation-only and Ring's flying camera has never reached general sale, six years after it was shown. What you can order today is a small rover with a camera, such as the Enabot EBO X, or a garden drone from Sunflower Labs, which quotes $4 to $7 an hour once installed. Our Bots For Sale list only includes machines with a real price and a real ship date.
Do security robots replace security guards?
Not in the way the phrase suggests. The largest security-robot company grew its revenue in 2026 mainly by buying a human guard firm and selling robots and guards together under one contract. In practice the robot watches and the person responds. The US labour statistics agency still projects about 157,000 guard openings a year through 2035. The AI and jobs timeline follows how similar roles are being reshaped rather than removed.
Are security robots actually effective?
They are good at what a camera on wheels can do: continuous coverage of a defined route, thermal detection at night, licence-plate reads, and being visible. They are poor at anything that needs a conversation or a pair of hands, and at least 13 of 21 tracked US deployments have ended, usually for that reason. The deployments that last tend to be industrial inspection jobs, where the machine's presence removes a person from a hazard rather than from a doorway. Spot's specifications show why it suits that work.
What data does a security robot collect, and who owns it?
Video, audio, thermal imagery, licence plates and, in at least one documented deployment, the Wi-Fi addresses of nearby devices. Under Knightscope's published terms the client owns the footage and can download it for two weeks, after which the company may delete it; one hospital deployment kept patrol data for 30 days in a government cloud with facial recognition disabled. The retention window is worth having in writing before anything is signed. The same questions apply to the home devices, which our guide to on-device AI and privacy walks through.