For industrial applications, that’s fine. A robot doesn’t have to be that smart to spin lug nuts onto wheels in an auto plant.

But as designers create a new breed of robot for service applications, the machines will have to interact with people on a more personal and intuitive level.

This is for practical reasons. You don’t want to have to hack away in raw programming language to tell your robot to fetch the newspaper. You want to say "Robot, fetch the newspaper," have the robot acknowledge the command and go do it. In this way, the language of command-and-response becomes speech and movement. Recognition of these patterns is how humans interpret emotion and intent, and it is how the robots of the future will interact with their human masters.

But this isn’t just to let us boss our robots around in the same way we’d boss our kids. The robots will also signal their needs in ways that are meaningful to humans.

Kismet, a robot under development at MIT, has a sensory system made up of cameras, sensors and microphones. If you get too close to its big childlike eyes — and therefore block the cameras that it uses to see — Kismet will jerk its head back.

A human would instantly interpret this response as a "violation of personal space" and react by jerking his own head back. In this example, the robot’s emotional response fulfills a very practical need: its field of vision is cleared and it can resume normal functioning.

In this way, emotional response becomes a sophisticated interface between man and machine. And studies show that humans have a better psychological response to machines that look and act more like them.

Instead of having to learn complicated programming languages to command or listen to the robots, users will be able to employ the same skills they’ve gained from a lifetime of interacting with people.

The Japanese, always a step ahead of the U.S. in gizmos and irradiated dinosaurs, already have sushi-rolling automatons and masseuse-bots.

In the U.S., funding is flowing from NASA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation to research universities like Carnegie-Mellon, U of Maryland’s Space Systems Lab, and MIT; and private companies like LunaCorp, Cybermotion and SRI Consulting are heavily invested in what should soon become a major growth sector.