Researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, are developing child-sized, wheeled robots that could soon start helping elderly people in their homes. Computer scientist Rod Grupen, who led the team that developed uBot-5, notes that robots are finally safe and inexpensive enough to perform a real function in homes. The robot has an LCD screen, a webcam, and a wireless connection to the Internet. It speeds around and balances on two Segway-like wheels. If it does happen to fall, though, uBot-5 uses its long arms to do a push-up, and return itself to an upright position.

I’ve just stepped onto the factory floor at Segway world headquarters in Bedford, New Hampshire, when two engineers sporting matching jeans (tapered), shirts (plaid) and hairlines (receding) glide by and shoot me matching expressions (grins). “Doesn’t anyone walk around here?” I ask, as the distinctive, almost melodic hum of the Human Transporter (HT) trails off. Segway development engineer David Robinson responds with a different expression, this one more quizzical than the one on his colleagues’ faces. “Would you?” he asks.

Chris Pesa is one of the first people to put the Segway Human Transporter (a.k.a. It, Ginger, and the Invention That Will Change the World) to a real-life test on his 390-stop mail route in Tampa, Florida. We caught up with him to see how it works.