Bill Gates: The days of R2-D2 are near ...

Imagine sometime in future, an office worker checks her home-gadget webpage from her work computer. The tasks she set for her home robots in the morning have all been completed: washing and ironing, vacuuming the lounge and mowing the lawn.

She orders dinner from the kitchen chefbot - sushi today, using a recipe from a Japanese website - then checks her elderly mother's house. The companionbot has given mum her medicine and helped her out of bed and into a chair.

This is the vision of the future offered by Bill Gates who, in the latest issue of Scientific American, argues that the robotics industry is on the cusp of a big expansion. He likens the current state of robotic technology to the situation in the fledgling computer industry when he and his fellow entrepreneur Paul Allen launched Microsoft in the mid-1970s.

"The level of excitement and expectation reminds me so much of that time when Paul and I looked at the convergence of new technologies and dreamed of the day when a computer would be on every desk and in every home," he writes. "I can envision a future in which robotic devices will become a nearly ubiquitous part of our day-to-day lives."

"It has proved extremely difficult to give robots the capabilities that humans take for granted. For example, the abilities to orient themselves with respect to the objects in a room, to respond to sounds and interpret speech, and to grasp objects of varying sizes, textures and fragility. Even something as simple as telling the difference between an open door and a window can be devilishly tricky for a robot."

There has been progress, however. In 2004 a race for robotic vehicles across 142 miles of rugged terrain in the Mojave Desert proved to be beyond the assembled field. The top performing robot car managed only seven miles before breaking down. But in 2005 the winner completed the course with an average speed of 19mph, followed by four other finishers.

Mr Gates thinks the plunging cost of computer memory and components will contribute to advances. But he believes that, like the early computer industry, robot developers need a common set of programming tools to solve problems such as dealing with numerous sources of information simultaneously. He has set up a team to solve these problems.