Since the early 1950s, futuristic scenarios of our daily lives at
home have included robots: robot maids, robot companions, robot
nannies, robot guards [1]. This vision has not substantially changed,
and it was only a few years ago that Bill Gates predicted in Scientific
American that there will soon be ‘‘a robot in every home’’ [2].
Where are we now, however? So far, the only success of domestic
robots can be noted in the field of floor-cleaning robots; millions