[craftinator]

> I would also guess that, given that it's supposed to be clever enough to spot an incapacitated casualty to rescue, it might be clever enough to stop trying to rescue you if you attempt to swim away.

One would hope, but I wouldn't hazard a guess at that. It likely uses some type of ML/NN to spot an incapacitated person; there are a bazillion pretrained models that recognized people in images. I know of no models that recognize when someone is "trying to escape". I think that that would be quite a difficult problem to solve, except for possibly a number of panic buttons. But in general, guessing a person's intent programmatically is really hard.

[frobozz]

For decades, all sorts of devices with very simple processors have been able to detect when the force against an actuator exceeds a certain amount and reverses or disengages it.

[craftinator]

Yes, but how do you infer intent from the force put against the actuator? There is no point in using this robot if it doesn't work if people are heavier than some arbitrary value, or if they get released because they bumped against something while being towed...

[frobozz]

Also, if it can spot an incapacitated person amongst all the other swimmers, then it must be able to recognise when people are not incapacitated, otherwise it would just be going around randomly grabbing swimmers.