Killer Robot - TV Tropes

"Two robots walk into an eating establishment... and destroy all humans!"

• 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.

• 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.

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

• 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 destroy 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.

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:

• 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.

• 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.
• The Roidmudes in Kamen Rider Drive. They weren't originally intended to be this, but their creator abused them and sabotaged them out of spite, filling them with a desire to Kill All Humans and causing them to rampage.
• 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.

• 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).

• 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.