BBC NEWS UK Magazine What happened to the Robot Age?

It seems that the robot designers are concentrating on things that are not priorities for potential consumers. Robots for the home will only be purchased when they can perform dull tasks properly without supervision. If I had the money to buy a robot to do the vacuum-cleaning, I wouldn't want to have to pay a cleaner to do the dusting as well; I'd want the robot to do it. Similarly a lawn-mowing robot would also need to be able to dig flower beds and remove weeds without damaging the plants I want to grow. The level of'hand-eye' coordination required for these simple tasks is beyond the capabilities of current robots and until that problem is solved no-one will be interested in whether they appear to have any empathy with humans, how they communicate or what they look like.