As children, no doubt most of us envisaged a future of flying cars, holidays in space and a simple life where robots catered to our every needs, cleaning the house, preparing meals and doing all our photocopying and filing at work. While companies such as Virgin Galactic (New Mexico, US) and Moller International (California, US) are beavering away to make space flight and hovercars a reality, it’s robotics that has really taken off.

Despite the sci-fi stereotypes, it seems unlikely that robots will take over the world, but all the signs indicate that robots will become ever more pervasive over the next few years, acting as hospital droids, home helps for our growing elderly population and doing our housework. Today, robots are also turning into entertainment gadgets capable of playing MP3s and videos, dancing and even fetching us beers.

The highbrow end of the market is represented by Honda’s Asimo (a humanoid robot created at Honda’s Research & Development Wako Fundamental Technical Research Center in Japan). It can walk, talk, run and even play football, but it’s far more than a novelty bot. “Our goal for Asimo is that one day it will help people in their homes, or in a hospital or care facility,” says Stephen Keeney, North American Asimo project leader for Honda.

“It could be answering the door, getting people their medicine, or providing them with a means to communicate through the Internet to other people. One day it could even be doing work that’s dangerous for humans, or work in unhealthy environments.”

The current version of Asimo (for Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility) is a step towards this goal, but the bot also has a more immediate educational use. This engaging, lifelike robot is touring US schools and colleges in a bid to encourage more students to study the sciences.

Another recently unveiled bot is the iRobot Create, a programmable robot designed for students and amateur roboticists to work on their own applications. So far, the uses are more modest than Asimo’s intention to help humanity. Among the first uses for iRobot were getting it to fetch beers from the fridge, and acting as a high-tech hamster playtoy. Students, eh?

“The robot market is really hot right now, and there are a lot of people who come to us saying you should make this robot or that robot,” says John Billington, senior product manager at iRobot (headquartered at Burlington, Massachusetts). “Now we’re helping them to make those ideas a reality. Robots are really popular, so there are lots of robotic clubs and competitions.”

Perhaps it’s a generational thing. Keeney admits that there is a clear difference between children’s view of robots and that of their parents. “They don’t think it’s strange that a robot will help them do their homework or clean up their room in the future,” he says. “They usually ask if Asimo will be able to go skateboarding with them. Older people look at him from a more utilitarian viewpoint, and hope he can vacuum and go shopping. They see the value of having something to do things for them and make their lives easier.”

While Honda has been teaching Asimo to run, at the more consumer end of the robot market, other firms have been working on pure entertainment bots. Sony discontinued its range of robo-dogs last year — the Aibos — but the baton has been taken up by firms such as Wowee. The company makes Robosapien, a humanoid robot that can walk, kick, dance, fart, burp and rap. The latest version, Robosapien RS Media, costs £235 and has a chest-mounted LCD screen, a built-in camera and speaker system, and plays MP3 music.

UK-based gadget retailer Boys Stuff began selling Robosapien three years ago. “They have proved really popular,” says Sarah Lawrence, the site’s head buyer. “In our first year alone, we sold 3,000 of them, and as the ranges have increased so have the sales.”

Other “entbots” include Japanese outfit Yujin Robot’s iRobiQ, which shows photos and videos on its own screen, as well as displaying recipes, news stories, educational material and karaoke lyrics. The French company Erector has Spyke, a spy-bot with a video camera, microphone and built-in Wi-Fi to stream footage over the web, while Wowee’s next big thing is an officially-licensed Elvis robot, that will sing classic Presley numbers.

“People love these robots because they are interactive and programmable, so it’s not just a toy you play with once and then neglect,” says Lawrence. “Also, robots are just cool. They’ve always been something really expensive and futuristic, so being able to have your own one is rather exciting. The fact that they dance, fight, take photos and play music makes them into an adult toy, rather than just a kid’s thing.”

There is little crossover between these entbots and the likes of Asimo, although Keeney says that the popularity of the former is good for the industry, as it makes people comfortable with the idea of having robots in their homes.

Meanwhile, Honda is pressing on with its ambitions for Asimo. The next step is less about physical actions like running (or, indeed, skateboarding), and more to do with enhancing its artificial intelligence. This mirrors developments in Europe with the Feelix Growing research project to develop more “emotional” robots, capable of reacting to human emotional cues.

“We’ve perfected Asimo’s mechanics of movement and mobility,” says Keenan. “Now we need to make Asimo truly smart enough to understand what we want him to do, and then carry it out on his own. We hope that in about 10 years, we’ll start to see versions of Asimo working in homes or hospitals.”