Etherbot is an autonomous mobile robot developed by Professor Ray Jarvis and his team at the Intelligent Robotics Research Centre at Melbourne's Monash University. All you do is tell it where you want it to go. If you shifted a few boxes around, it would stop, recalculate the position and find its way around. The most advanced humanoid robot has been developed by the Japanese. One of the aims is not to use the robot in factories but in homes.
Japan has the most rapidly ageing population in the world.
We have the same problem in this country but we're really not confronting it. The Japanese solution is that we'll have domestic servants who will do this and they will be small, humanoid robots. Professor Jarvis believes there are still enormous opportunities within industry. But back to the housework. It's going to take some research funding and a few more years before we'll be seeing anything like this on the market.