Banned From the US? There's a Robot for That

Two telepresence robots roll into a human-computer interaction conference. Sounds like the beginning of a very nerdy joke, but it really happened (#2017). A few weeks ago in Denver, Colorado, a robot I was piloting over the internet from my computer in Idaho stood wheel-to-wheel with a similar'bot in a pink skirt controlled by a researcher in Germany. We introduced ourselves by yelling at each other's screens. Given the topic of the conference, this particular human-computer interaction was a little too on the HD touch-screen nose.