That being said there are some interesting legal issues with telerobots. Currently, most laws we have presume the person performing the crime is physically present. For example, in the unlikely event that one of these robots injures someone or causes property damage who exactly is held liable?
Another interesting case is if an evil set of Berkeley engineering students in desperate need of robot parts for a project, pays the driver of one of these robots to disable tracking and drive it to a secret robot chop-shop. Supposedly, the penalties for the evil Berkely engineering students can be less than if they went out and kidnapped the robot, because the company allowed and trusted the worker with access to the robot.
This was the story I was referring to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11520681.
Was it false, or did things change in the past year?
From https://angel.co/kiwicampus: "Current self driving algorithms require huge amounts of data to be trained with, so our robots are initially being controlled from Colombia."
(not affiliated, I just found these DIY-like robots very fun)