Humanoid robots join the no-fly list
Southwest invoked battery rules written for laptops to ban humanoid robots — whose packs run an order of magnitude larger
ON MAY 11th, a 3.5-foot humanoid robot named Stewie boarded a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 at Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas, walked itself to a window seat, and flew to Dallas Love Field without incident. Stewie's owner, Aaron Mehdizadeh of The Robot Studio, a Dallas firm that rents humanoid robots for corporate events, had bought the machine a ticket under Southwest's "fragile item" fare — the category ordinarily reserved for musical instruments and wedding dresses. To clear airport security, Mehdizadeh had swapped Stewie's standard pack for a smaller battery roughly equivalent to a laptop's. Video of Stewie strapped politely into its window seat went viral. Two days later, on May 13th, Southwest banned every robot in the category.
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