New robots are on the way from iRobots in Sommerville, MA. Battle field reconnaissance, hostage situations (did you know LA has a hostage situation every three days?), or for pestering...er, communicating with fellow workers:

CoWorker is a big step forward from the teleconferencing systems that have been bopping around corporate America for many years. With today's systems, you need to ask your colleagues to meet you for a teleconference. With CoWorker, you drive the teleconferencing system into their offices-quite handy when the long-distance workmates won't answer your e-mails.

One can quickly envision the office of the future, where everyone has their own communications bot but the true skill is in being able to program your bot to deflect other people's bots from reaching you. A confuse-o-bot.

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