Probo, a friend for life?

A dream alike is shared today in the robotics community to develop a personal autonomous humanoid robot. Imagine a robot whose legged structure is perfectly adapted to the human environment and which is able to walk around and perform some standard household duties, relieving its owners even from the task of instructing him to attend these duties. It welcomes all the family members coming home while recognizing their face and responding to specific inflections in their voices. It will react in an adapted way depending on their mood and emotional state by focusing on facial expressions and specific voice patterns. The humanoid house pal stores personal information of each family member and even tracks their daily schedule to support them as a highly sophisticated personal assistant. This intelligent, skillful and versatile machine will not only coordinate many of our annoying administrative tasks, guard the house, and so on, but will become in a sense an artificial social family partner.