Humanoid robots are coming, but there's still a design challenge: making us like and trust them

Humanoid robots may be part of our future, but what we use them for partly depends on answers to very human questions: Do we trust them? Do we like them? 

According to one prediction, the mass-adoption of droids is only a few years away. Within a generation, there will be billions. They will be as common as cars or vacuum cleaners. They will assemble our products, package our orders, deliver our boxes, pick up our deliveries, and care for us from cradle to grave. 

A robot's face may be the last thing some of us ever see.

Or maybe not. Predictions don't always come true. COVID-era virtual reality headsets gather dust and, for many of us, the blockchain happily remains a mystery.One of the big variables for humanoid robots is acceptance: Will people want them in their homes?

For this reason, robot-makers are thinking hard about design.

They're adding necks and swivelling heads to machines that need neither, just so you get the impression they do.

They're installing fake eyes on products that actually "see" through cameras in their bodies, and navigate the world using a spectrum of light our eyes cannot detect.

The whole ensemble is being clothed in figure-hugging knitwear, so that some recent designs look like a cross between a stuffed toy and a tidy, well-dressed bachelor.

The challenges of making the non-human humanoid, but also not weird, are immense. How do you make a home-helper that's strong enough to be useful, but small enough to be non-threatening? 

Where's the line between lifelike and creepy?

The answers to these questions are at the messy interface of engineering and human psychology; where 21st-century technology meets millions of years of evolution. 

Why make them humanoid?

Unlike the articulated arms that bolt together cars or etch microchips, these new robots are designed to fit into our human-size world.

They can walk through standard doorways, climb stairs and pick up tools made for a bipedal ape with opposable thumbs.

Some are designed to slot into the intimate world of the home: to provide company for the lonely and support for the infirm, to teach our children and to tuck us in at night.

So they need the physical dimensions and approximate capabilities of a human but we also need to trust and like them.