Human in the Loop: What the Avatar XPrize Revealed About the Future of Telepresence Robots

It's still an achievement for autonomous robots to merely survive in the real world, which is a long way from any kind of useful generalized autonomy. Under some fairly specific constraints, autonomous robots are starting to find a few valuable niches in semistructured environments, like offices and hospitals and warehouses. But when it comes to the unstructured nature of disaster areas or human interaction, or really any situation that requires innovation and creativity, autonomous robots are often at a loss.