‘Marty’ The Robot escapes from a local food store to get some fresh air: Watch

Who said robots don’t take a break from work? That was the case with Marty, a six-foot (1.8 meters) towering robot that works at a local Giant Food store in the Lehigh Valley area of Pennsylvania. Perhaps Marty was tired after working a long hour or maybe he just wanted to get a glimpse of the world outside the store’s sliding doors.

According to customers who witnessed the event, Marty got off the job and strolled across the parking lot, and almost made it to freedom before he was wrangled back to his grocery prison. A viral video published on Facebook shows “Marty,” a robot with big googley-eyes, escaping. The robot eventually had to be pushed back inside by an employee.

“Marty escaped from the Hellertown Giant and almost made it to freedom before he was escorted back to his grocery prison,” the video’s description said.

A spokesperson for Giant told Harrisburg-based WHTM that Marty “was just on a fresh air break.”

Below is a copy of the Facebook video that was posted on YouTube.

Equipped with multiple cameras and scanners, Marty was designed to roam autonomously around the Giant store looking for spills and other potential hazards and patrolling aisles for out-of-stock items. In an effort to make the robots rolling a bit less imposing in their stores, Giant Store decided to outfit them with large googly eyes.

No one knew why Marthy tried to escape the store. However, according to the local ABC news affiliate, a representative from Giant said Marty was “on a fresh air break.”

In the video’s comment section, one person joked: “You know the work environment is horrible when even a robot that is designed to only work gets tired of it.” 

“Even Marty stressed out with society,” someone else said.

Another person said: “This sounds like a sad, dystopian-esque short story in which a machine gains sentience and tries to flee what it was built for, only to fail in the end.”