We’re looking at the heavy-duty digits of a Hubo humanoid robot hanging in his UNLV engineering lab, and Paul Oh is trying to help me understand why they’re not as elegant as mine. Yet.

The little girl squirmed in her mother’s arms inside a lab at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, her American flag-themed dress contrasting with the hammers, rulers and other engineering equipment that surrounded her.

That UNLV students were selected to compete in the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon against teams from elite private institutions such as Stanford University, the University of Southern California and the California Institute of Technology was an accomplishment by itself.

Then UNLV went and beat them all.

Robots on the open road. That could be the future for Nevada, which opened its roadways to driverless cars in 2011. Nevada also recently hosted the Consumer Electronic Show, where Toyota and Audi unvieled self-driving technology. So how far are we from the science-fiction fantasy of driverless cars? And how will it change how we drive in the future?