Yes, that's a bit that connects a room and an elevator. Sometimes it's not required and sometimes it's much bigger. As there are two rooms that share an elevator, the doors may be not aligned (for many reasons), to align the elevator entrances, such rooms are added.
Such rooms are in the game for a while now. I guess that robots were being spawned there too. What has changed is that some robots do not get any hints where to go to meet player (so you should be able to surprise them) + when they are far away from the player, they are not advanced/processed. An additional thing was that the elevator was waiting for the player. So this particular robot was just standing there, waiting. A lot of coincidences :)