David Hanson’s robots can creep people out. Their heads are so lifelike, their skin so textured and realistic, that Candy Sidner, a competing roboticist, called his Albert Einstein robot “spookily cool… a giant step forward.” Hanson, who started his career as an artist and spent time working in Disney’s Imagineering Lab, said he flirts with being too realistic for comfort. His work, he said, “poses an identity challenge to the human being.”