Robots could now serve as immigration officers for late-night flights

Imagine arriving at a faraway country at 3am in the morning and greeted at the immigration point by a robot!

If indications are anything to go by, then this could be reality in the very near future as on display at the Paris Air Show was a set of shiny, white, plastic and mechanical terrestrial guards.

Thales, the French company that makes the robots, says they will share scans of passengers' faces with other computers around the airport.

After which it then prints the passenger's face on the boarding pass, somehow in an encrypted form. Gate agents can then check the scan, confirming that the person the robot saw is in fact the person they are letting on the plane.

It may seem a little far-fetched but the French seem pretty confident of its efficiency as French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius politely implied that Frenchmen could stand to be a little nicer to tourists.

Go figure!