India, May 25 -- From a bright sunny day on the Stanford campus, I head down into the basement of its Electrical Engineering building. It's not dark or dingy, rather, the newly opened Stanford Robotics Center is polished and rather sparkly, the open space gleaming in excitement, segueing off into glass rooms on either side. Before I can introduce myself on the tour - we're all here to see robots - I'm distracted by two rather tiny and completely non threatening bots that come and kind of sniff us. One's a dog-shaped one, its four legs moving jaggedly. The second is an egg-shaped Relay Robot, an autonomous delivery robot that twirls in greeting.

The Stanford Robotics Center opened earlier this year as a space for interdisciplinary project...