PRINCETON/WARSAW — Last month, Gecko Systems announced that it had been running trials of its "fully autonomous personal companion home care robot," also known as a "carebot," designed to help elderly or disabled people to live independently. A woman with short-term memory loss broke into a big smile, the company reported, when the robot asked her, "Would you like a bowl of ice cream?" The woman answered "yes," and presumably the robot did the rest.

Robots already perform many functions, from making cars to defusing bombs — or, more menacingly, firing missiles. Children and adults play with toy robots, while vacuum-cleaning robots are sucking up dirt in a growing number of homes and — as evidenced by YouTube videos — entertaining cats. There is even a Robot World Cup, though, judging by the standard of the event held in Graz, Austria, last summer, footballers have no need to feel threatened just yet. (Chess, of course, is a different matter.)

Most of the robots being developed for home use are functional in design — Gecko System's home-care robot looks rather like the Star Wars robot R2-D2. Honda and Sony are designing robots that look more like the same movie's "android" C-3PO. There are already some robots, though, with soft, flexible bodies, humanlike faces and expressions, and a large repertoire of movement. Hanson Robotics has a demonstration model called Albert, whose face bears a striking resemblance to that of Albert Einstein.