Japanese robot model

So robots hit the news again today.  The BBC have featured the latest Japanese fashion model robot, HRP-4C.  While I don't think human supermodels have anything to worry about for now, clearly steps continue to be made (literally) with huge numbers of different capabilities of robots, as they seem to feature in the news more and more often.   This latest example is clearly an advance in the movement and human look-alike areas.  Other examples of research results have shown progress in machine understanding, empathy and facial expression, mood detection, vision and dexterity.  

The pace of development of all these features and more bodes well for the further acceptance and application of robots.  However anyone expecting the super bot to be domestically available even in a decade may be disappointed ... rather it will take as long for domestic robots to begin to be used but with subsets of capability.  This is a natural extension of the vacuum cleaning and grass cutting robots already commercially available which address one particular application each.  Their capabilities will gradually be added to and the applications expanded.  As the Japanese robot HRP-4C demonstrated today, it will be one step at a time!