Consumers envision living with robots.
Xerox PARC's new breed of robots adapts to different environments. Plenty of futurists predicted robots would be widely used in our daily lives by the turn of the century. The vision gathered momentum in the '70s, when many believed industrial robots were going to make the factory-floor worker obsolete. A Space Odyssey, Silent Running, and Star Wars . In practice, robots rarely proved to be a good replacement for humans.