Walking humanoid robots with legs and arms will be part of society by the year 2050, an expert who is helping to develop "socially interactive" machines said today.
The age of the android was already dawning, said Dr Frank Pollick, a psychology lecturer at Glasgow University.
Honda and Sony had already both produced dwarf-like robots - Asimo and SDR-3X - capable of walking and moving their limbs in complex ways.
Such devices, like robot dogs, were little more than entertaining toys despite their sophistication.
But Dr Pollick said the technology would not end there once robots were developed with the "social intelligence" to interact with humans.
He described taking part in a Japanese research project involving a humanoid robot which performs Tai Chi with a human partner.
The 6ft tall metal and plastic android carried out an exercise called "sticky hands" in which two partners put their hands together and move them backwards, forwards, and around, in a mutually satisfying manner.
Dubbed DB - for "Dynamic Brain" - the robot followed the movements with extraordinary sensitivity, watching the action with the four camera eyes mounted on its head.
Occasionally when the human did something unexpected, DB would stare, disconcertedly, at its partner.
Dr Pollick, who himself took part in the ATR Cyberhuman Project experiment in Kyoto, said: "Whenever the robot met something it didn't expect, its reaction was to stare straight at you, which was kind of disturbing.
"It was a cold, hard, stare."
To what extent robots developed from such experiments became integrated into society, depended purely on how acceptable they were to humans, said Dr Pollick.
But he predicted that despite possible initial resistance they would eventually be regarded as a normal feature of everyday life.
Speaking at the British Association science festival at Glasgow University, he said: "Once people start growing up with these things they're going to be adopted in ways we can't predict now.
"We are already seeing them being used in entertainment. The dinosaurs in the film Jurassic Park were mostly robots. By the year 2050 there will be a lot of these robots doing all kinds of different things."
They could be doing the housework, working in the office, assisting nurses in hospitals - or even playing sport.
One team from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pennsylvania, organisers of the RoboCup world football tournament, hoped to field a machine team fit to compete with humans by 2050.
PA