Video Of Bahrain King's Robot Bodyguard? Not Quite

A video of Titan, a manually operated, tall and hefty robotic suit walking in front of a man dressed in a thawb and wearing a keffiyeh on his head is being shared with the false claims that the man is the monarch of Bahrain and the robot is his personal bodyguard. The robot is Titan, a partially-mechanised robotic suit developed by a British robotics company.

The video is being shared on Facebook with the caption "King of Bahrain arrives in Dubai with his Robot bodyguard. Talk about the 4th Industrial Revolution. It can speak 6 languages. It can rescue him literally carry him from mobs. It can physically fight, chase, shoot. It's armed with an electric teaser, an undisclosed 360 degrees camera system Secondary to a set of infrared cameras, 3 hidden machine guns with enough ammunition to fight 1050 men and a laser guided sniper machine gun. It also carries the medications and water. The guard cost about US $7.4 million."

Archives of the Facebook post can be found here and archives of the tweets can be found here and here.

BOOM also received the video and caption on our WhatsApp helpline

Fact Check

BOOM noticed the word Etimad written on the floor in the video. On running a keyword search with "Etimad robot", we found this article by Gulf News. The headline of the article reads: Meet Titan, the robot greeter in Abu Dhabi.

The article mentions how a 8ft tall and weighing 60 kilos robot greeter at Abu Dhabi Idex was a big hit on UAE social media. It goes on to say that the partially mechanised robotic suit Titan, is the world's first commercial entertainment robot artist developed by the British company Cyberstein.

Titan is a partially-mechanised and has an operator inside the suit who controls the movement of the robot from the inside.

The article also quotes Titan saying, "The best thing to happen to me at Idex this year is being hired by the Safe City Group. Yay!" adding that it wore a military vest and walked between the crowd.

A Google search on Titan the Robot led us to this website run by Cyberstein. The Instagram account on the social media section of the website led us to Titan's Instagram account where we found this post from February 18, 2019. The caption of the post reads: Titan and Dave having a great time in Abu Dhabi this weekend.

In the image, Titan can be seen wearing a beige coloured vest with the UAE flag on it. In the viral video, the robot can also be seen wearing the same vest with the flag on it.

Below is a comparison of the screenshot from the video (L) and the image from Titan's Instagram.