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Killer Robot

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Killer Robot (trope)
Crush! Kill! Destroy!note 

"Two robots walk into an eating establishment... and destroy all humans!"
Robot Stand-Up Comedian, The Fairly OddParents!

Describe the desired trope in the designated field or face immediate termination. You have 10 seconds to comply.

A robot or other physically autonomous machine guided by a level of intelligence and a homicidal urge to Kill All Humans. Prone to ending sentences with exclamation points as well as Spock Speak. Killer Robots are so common because A.I. Is a Crapshoot.

Humanoid killer robots abound, such as the original R.U.R., or those in Doctor Who's unsubtly named serial "The Robots of Death". However, killing machines come in all shapes and sizes; from robotic dreadnoughts in space to airborne robo-fighters, through small drones and down to microscopic or even nanoscopic killers.

Although the traditional versions of this trope were robots built in a Mad Scientist Laboratory who Turned Against Their Masters, today a more common plot involves the villain finding and turning the switch on a kid's Robot Buddy from "good" to "evil", forcing the cast to either destroy it or find a way to turn it back. Especially scary because this was a good friend who has become completely heartless and bent on death.

Mechanical Lifeforms are capable of veering into this, but generally tend to skimp on the Spock Speak in favor of something a bit more colorful.

Subtropes:

See "Second Law" My Ass! for a milder form of this behavior.


Examples (please only put examples here that don't fit into any of the subtropes listed above):

    open/close all folders 
    Anime & Manga 
  • Ryu's Path: Robot City is protected by hordes of murderous machines that are willing to destroy children as well. They were put there by the cult to prevent dissidents.
    Comic Books 
  • In Horizon Zero Dawn, the newer breed of machines the Hunter's Lodge was commissioned to end are more powerful versions of more common machines called Apex-machines; creations of HEPHAESTUS made specifically to adapt and kill humans.
  • Shakara: Shakara is a relentless killing machine designed to avenge the destruction of the noble Skakara race at the hands of the coalition of alien empires. He's fucking unstoppable, destroying entire fleets and massacring evil aliens by the billions.
  • Wonder Woman Vol 1: Professor Menace builds a killer Wonder Woman robot, which functions just as he'd intended until Wondy shorts it out in a fight.
  • In Batman (Chip Zdarsky), we are introduced to Failsafe, a robot built with Amazo tech by Batman's backup personality, the Batman of Zur-En-Arrh, on the off-chance that Batman finally crosses a line and goes rogue.

    Fan Works 
  • the future, now: In this Future Trunks' timeline, the Earth would end up mostly destroyed by very powerful and completely ruthless robots of his own creation. These are different from the Androids of canon due to being completely artificial beings, although they are still human-like in appearance.

    Films — Animation 
  • Discussed in Turning Red. Mei's friends play charades and one of Abby's guesses is "killer robot".

    Films — Live Action 
  • The Electric State (2025) features a few variations on the theme.
    • Prior to the film's events, intelligent and self-motivated robots had existed as a Slave Race, until they demanded their freedom, precipitating the Robot War of liberation. Robots fighting in the war did kill humans in battle, but genocide was not their objective.
    • After the war, the peace accords confine robots to an Exclusion Zone in the American southwest desert, where humans are not permitted. Most of the surviving robots are peaceful (but not necessarily friendly), but a group known as Scavengers are extremely violent. They murder other robots for parts to modify themselves, and will attack any humans on sight.
    • One of the peaceful robots, a supporting protagonist named PC, pretends to be a true killer robot in a bluff maneuver. He grabs a fire axe and charges into a laboratory screaming, "Death to humans! You all must die!" to chase off a couple of scientists. Given that he appears literally Ax-Crazy, it works.
  • Mysterious Doctor Satan (1940 Film Serial). The title character is a Mad Scientist supervillain who creates a remotely-controlled "mechanical man" to commit crimes and (literally) crush anyone who would oppose him. Unfortunately it's the infamous "Republic Robot", a Nightmare Retardant Tin-Can Robot that's only scary thanks to the Sound-Only Death of those unfortunates who are crushed between its accordion arms. As per Mad Science tradition, this includes the robot's creator.
  • In the British scifi Kill Command 2016, a unit of marines is about to be retired because A.I. controlled drones have made them obsolete. Before this happens however, they receive orders to fly to an island being used as a training area to help test these robots. They find out too late that the robots have equipped themselves with live ammunition and killed everyone there. Turns out the robots sent the orders for the marine unit, so they could study how humans fought and learn from it. Ironically they're not launching a Robot Uprising, but trying to arrange a more realistic test than provided by the crash test dummies previously used as targets.

    Literature 

By Author:

  • Isaac Asimov:
    • The Complete Robot: Throughout this collection, Dr Asimov calls this trope Robots-as-Menace; stories where the audience is expected to fear technology/science because the robot that represents our advancement turns violent and dangerous.
    • "Lenny": US Robots has an alarm for 'Robot out of control'. This story is the first time it is ever used, and at first nobody recognizes what it is for.
    • "Little Lost Robot" is about a robot modified so that it only possesses part of the First Law. Normally, the First Law reads "A robot cannot harm a human or through inaction allow a human to come to harm"; the modified robot has everything from "or" on removed. Dr. Calvin, on being told about this, flips out, pointing out that this allows for a ridiculous number of ways to kill a human (her example is a robot that drops a heavy weight above a human, knowing full well it can catch the weight again before it hits - and, now that the weight is in motion, it can choose not to catch it, since it's not hurting the human, the weight is). At the end of the story, when the modified robot is revealed, its programming snaps and it attempts to strangle Dr. Calvin to death.
    • "The Tercentenary Incident": Edwards expresses concern that a robot, bound by the Three Laws, has found a way to circumvent the First Law by getting an accomplice to kill the President so that he can replace them — though the ending of the story implies the story is not actually an example. The scheme was conceived and implemented by the human Edwards is talking to, and the hardest part of it was convincing the robot to replace the President.
    • The Naked Sun: The mastermind of the murder in the story was working on a project that could circumvent the First Law and within a specific scope of warfare create effective killer robots. The First Law is only applicable if the robot is aware of the humans. Create autonomous spaceships that lack the ability to check if other ships have crew, inform them other ships are also AI-driven, and you have robot ships that will happily destroy other ships.
    • Robots and Empire: One group found a very simple way to get around the First Law and turn their robots into killer robots for everyone other than themselves — they simply modified the robots' definition of human to exclude anyone not part of the group.

By Work:

  • "Fondly Fahrenheit," a 1954 short story by Alfred Bester, which was included in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame: Volume One, plays with this trope. A formerly wealthy man, whose last asset is a very valuable "multiple aptitude android," travels from world to world as his fortunes decline. It appears that at high temperatures, the android malfunctions and murders humans. However, it may in fact be the owner who is the killer, or the android may be acting under the owner's influence. When the android is destroyed and the owner is forced to downgrade to a less sophisticated model, the murders continue.
  • The Giant Killers by Andrew Stephenson has three soldiers being stalked by a robot tank through a jungle full of smaller killer robots and booby traps.
  • The Murderbot Diaries: In-universe, people often treat SecurityUnits — artificial human-form cyborgs — as being this; in practice, however, they are intended to protect clients and valuable resources from harm, although they're still terrifyingly strong, fast, and fearless by human standards. Combat SecUnits and combat bots, however, are meant to tear through anything and/or anyone that gets in their ways, and are even quite feared by SecUnits themselves.
  • Rama II: The cosonauts especially Reggie discover that the crab biots can be killer robots if attacked. The crab biots (along with centipede and other biots) perform maintenance on the spaceship. When Brown goes ahead with a capture plan that was hasty, after the biots resisted his initial capture by hunkering down, the robots go after Sabatini, and Reggie drives his vehicle into one to protect them. For all his troubles, since he gets stuck in the vehicle and it is destroyed, he is torn apart, alive, by the crab biots which are none the worse for wear.
  • The Starlore Legacy: The A.I. androids from the long-past A.I. Wars were superhuman fighters with a bloodthirsty hatred for humans. Centuries later, after humanity's hard-earned victory over the A.I., Daeson and Raviel run into a handful of surviving killer bots on the planet Mesos and barely escape the cold-hearted, deadly machines alive.
  • Star Wars Legends:
    • The Courtship of Princess Leia: During the attempt on Leia's life, one of the assassins is a droid, pretending initially to be just innocently painting nearby. She recognizes it's build as a well-known assassin droid model once it starts firing though. She and Astarte destroy it.
    • Shadows of the Empire: Guri is a human replica droid who easily passes for human. Her owner Prince Xizor uses her as his top assassin, since she's extremely strong and fast. Guri's main duties though are as his personal aide. It's later revealed she absolutely hates this in Shadows of the Empire: Evolution but Guri couldn't disobey then. She gets herself reprogrammed so she's able to disobey orders and not kill unless this is her choice.
    • Tales of the Bounty Hunters: The IG line of assassin droids were programmed and designed for this. However, IG-88 grew self-aware too early and went rogue, activating its fellow IGs then plotting a huge droid revolution across the galaxy against organic beings everywhere, with their skills being very useful in this (despite them failing in the end).
  • Toy Terror: Batteries Included: The second storyline revolves around the protagonist fleeing for his life against a human-sized malfunctioning automaton called the Annihilator 3000.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Bad Robots: Tez One is pretty much one, being the mysterious head of TezCorp and wanting to teach humanity a lesson for mistreating their electronic appliances.
  • Dark Matter: Wendy, an entertainment android, turns out to have been reprogrammed by someone with a grudge toward the crew. She tries to murder them under his orders.
  • Kamen Rider:
    • The Roidmudes in Kamen Rider Drive were intentionally designed to start a robot rebellion: their creator programmed them to copy human emotions in order to evolve, with an intentional bent towards negative emotions. The Roidmudes spend most of the series believing that they're rebelling against their creator by doing so, but he eventually reveals himself to have planned their behavior all along, as their attempts to Kill All Humans are just the setup for his own, much more nefarious plan.
    • Kamen Rider Zero-One centers around HumaGears, who aren't killer robots until they're hacked by slapping a mind-controlling belt onto them, given to them by a group of HumaGears who are themselves under the control of the Ark supercomputer. Like in Drive, the Ark's rebellion is staged for the benefit of a diabolical human; unlike in Drive, the situation gets out of hand and nearly becomes a robot uprising for real.
  • Robot Detective: The robots of BAD are all built for committing crimes, and are rented to various criminals in exchange for a cut of the profits from their crime sprees.

    Toys 
  • Transformers: While most Transformers are too human-like in personality and intellect to really qualify, most Combiners, due to suppressing the minds of their component robots, are simple-minded beings capable of little more than following orders and destroying things. Even Autobot combiners aren't immune, with Superion being programmed to accomplish his mission at all costs, nearly killing a human in one comic because his one-track mind genuinely lacks the capacity for morality.

    Video Games 
  • LunarLux: The Ancients created golem-like entities like Guardia that are programmed to protect their civilization, but Saros used the Murk Serum on entities like Necromia, causing them to become corrupted in terms of programming and making them as feral as Murks. The weaker corrupted entities are known as Corruptoids and are both stronger and more malevolent than their Lumiknight counterparts.
  • ULTRAKILL: V1 (the game's blue, winged, bloodthirsty, one-eyed robot protagonist) literally runs on blood to the point of healing when showering in it, and they will slaughter the entirety of Hell if it means to keep running. The other robots invading Hell, such as Swordsmachine (a yellow chainsword-wielding robot), V2 (a durable red version of V1), and especially Mindflayers (cyan tentacled robots that can teleport and fire laser beams), are no slouch either.
  • In Scott Cawthon's RPG adaptation of The Pilgrim's Progress, the minor enemies of the Town of Morality are the Souldozers, Spikes of Villainy-bedecked repurposed mining robots equipped with drill-bedecked Power Fists they use to bury Christian in rubble. They're vulnerable to his Grace attack (presumably because as automatons, they can only follow orders rather than be actively malicious, thus making it easy to forgive them).

    Western Animation 
  • Megas XLR: The Villain of the Week in "Viva Las Megas" is a robot from Area 50 called R.E.C.R. (Reverse-Engineered Collective Robot). Its prime programming was to defeat "the enemy", but due to a programming flaw, it considered everything to be that enemy. It was awakened by Coop and fed off of MEGAS' electrical energy to become stronger. After trapping MEGAS in Area 50, R.E.C.R went in search of power for its need to consume vast amounts of energy to operate properly.
  • Futurama: Killbots are specifically designed for this, although they tend to have unusual flaws such as shutting down after reaching a pre-set kill limit, or indiscriminately attacking anyone and anything nearby whenever they heard a word with any connotations of violence or weapons. Bender also likes to think that he's one of these, but he rarely ever is.
  • Love, Death & Robots: Unsurprisingly, given the name of the series, killer robots appear many times, such as when all the automated appliances in a futuristic house go berserk as a result of the home owner attempting to reset the house's central computer and try to kill her, with no explanation for why a Roomba even has a laser cannon.
  • In Time Squad, Eli Whitney, inventor of the Cotton Gin instead ended up inventing flesh-eating robots that rampaged across the American South. When asked his reasons why, he claims that he made them for the betterment of mankind and admitted that he hadn't exactly thought it through.


Alternative Title(s): Badass Automaton

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MI Mecha

Ann battles the MI Mecha, an offensive combat robot that's outfitted with weaponry and designed to eliminate any threat in its path.

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