ATLANTA - Hollywood might have had RoboCop, but the real world now has a robot more attuned to the prosaic realities of the street.

The Bum Bot.

That is what Rufus Terrill calls the rolling, remote-controlled invention he uses to flush out the prostitutes and pushers who gather near his Midtown Atlanta bar, which is two blocks from the city's largest and most controversial homeless shelter.

"This is actually the Bum Bot 2000," Terrill gently corrected on a recent evening as he switched on the device.

The Bum Bot, like the homeless people it polices, is a creature of hand-me-downs. The wheels are from one of those scooters for the elderly; the PA system is a walkie-talkie wired to a home-alarm speaker. The rotating turret is an old Cajun meat smoker.

The cylindrical smoker gives the Bum Bot its R2-D2-ish profile. But its black armor - made of exercise mats - and the stenciled letters spelling out SECURITY lend it a menacing air.

An infrared camera and a 2-million-candlepower spotlight are mounted on the turret under a homemade cannon, which squirts jets of cold water at up to 200 pounds per square inch.

Using a twin-joystick remote, Terrill usually sends his robot up the street to the parking lot of a day-care center, where a sketchy, drug-dealing crowd congregates after dark. The police sometimes round them up, Terrill says, but soon, it seems, they are back on the street.

So Terrill speaks to them through the Bum Bot, transmitting his voice via walkie-talkie: Move along, he tells the loiterers, or get wet.

Sometimes he tells them that he's capturing them on video: the Bum Bot's camera feeds into a big-screen TV back at his pub, giving patrons a hyper-local dose of reality TV. The street people tend to run away.

His home-grown strategy for making the neighborhood safer is the latest manifestation of a lingering controversy that has engulfed this prized patch of real estate.

The perpetrators, he says, are the residents of the massive emergency homeless shelter nearby at Peachtree and Pine streets. Terrill says the shelter attracts the kind of people who have broken into his bar, O'Terrill's, and harassed and mugged his neighbors and clients.

Debi Starnes, the mayor's policy adviser on homelessness, said the shelter, which can accommodate 1,000 people per night, is too big to be managed properly. She also said it fails to adequately help the homeless make the transition to a better life.

The shelter is run by the nonprofit Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless. Anita Beaty, the task force's executive director, said the shelter provides employment referrals, mental health counseling and other services. The problem, she says, is that local government has not come to grips with the magnitude of its homeless problem. This, she says, is the last place for them to go.

Beaty said the Bum Bot doesn't help matters: "Not everybody outside our building is a drug dealer, and when they are, we want them arrested as much as (Terrill). A robot is not the way to solve anything."

But Terrill said the robot has done a good job scaring off the law-breakers. On a recent Wednesday evening, he ambled toward the day-care parking lot with his creation rolling along at his side. When he arrived about 11:30 p.m., the lot was empty.

(Later, however, after he packed up the robot, dozens of men would swarm the place, hooting after passing vehicles.)

Terrill, an engineer who has designed weapons systems for the military, says he is targeting the people who are causing trouble, not the ones trying to get ahead. He has no problem with those people. In fact, he says, he has employed about 70 men from the shelter at his bar over the years.

Meanwhile, back at home, Terrill has worked up plans for a Bum Bot 3000.

This model, he said, would used compressed air to shoot netting at people who refused to move on. But he's afraid that could land him in trouble.