10 Ways Robots Will Change All Our Lives Forever

Since pretty much the birth of robotics, the "home help" bot has been developed and redeveloped in the hope that, one day, we won't have to lift a finger as our own personal Butler Bot stirs a delicious spaghetti bolognese whilst we watch the telly.

These visions of the future are usually in the form of slightly comical humanoid-style robot with various attachments for sweeping up leaves and reading bedtime stories to your kids. These are still very much on the cards, as the latest development of the Personal Robot 2 (or PR2) demonstrates. This personal household robot has two arms, some semblance of a face and is capable of everything from folding your washing to cooking your breakfast.

However, the future of household robots is beginning to move away from this slightly 1950s futurist style towards something that we might already be more familiar with, something much more device based.

That is to say, we will probably have lots of different, specialised droids for lots of different tasks. It's very difficult to get a single machine to do multiple tasks, they're just not that adaptive at the moment (and for the foreseeable future). It is much more likely that we will see advances in smart homes with multirobot systems rather than a single robot that rolls around on a monowheel and gets stuck in corners whilst trying to bring you breakfast in bed.

These could consist of wandering cleaner bots (Roomba anyone?), automated kitchen systems that could start your breakfast as your alarm goes off, or even a roving air purifier that seeks out odours and airborne dust (this was actually displayed at CES 2015 as Atomobot). Swarm robotics, better known for their medical applications as nanobots could well get a look in too as a little roving colony of cleaner bots.

But, worry not, if you still fancy a butler bot, there are still a number of them in development, you'll just have to put up with comical clumsiness for a bit.