Step into the latest exhibition at London's Science Museum, and you will be instantly welcomed by an animatronic baby. With his moving arms and blinking eyes, this incredibly realistic mechanical human is a bewildering - if not unsettling - sight. And that's one of the goals of the museum's new show looking at 500 years of humanoid robots: to chart their evolution and explore our reaction towards them throughout history. "Robots trouble us," curator Ben Russell tells Al Jazeera. "When you see a robot you're reading a lot into it as a human. If they are very life-like you don't really know what is the source of their being," he continues.