Why Should We Be Friends?

There's the egg-shaped PaPeRo—recently rated the most popular bot in Japan by Robot Life magazine—which works select day-care centers, singing songs and reading e-mails to children according to texted instructions from parents. There's Actroid, a mannequinesque gynoid who wows corporate guests with her dynamic facial expressions and cheeky conversation skills (ask her how much she weighs, and she'll tell you what she can bench-press).

The Tmsuk Co. makes a cheery yellow and white bot that watches shoppers' kids at a mall in Fukuoka (identifying them by name via a programmable badge and keeping track of their movements with a built-in security camera), as well as a hospital porter bot that can carry luggage and guide people to elevators and a cute receptionist bot that converses in local dialects and prints out maps for visitors.

And, of course, there's Asimo, Honda's spacemanlike android who most recently made headlines for conducting the Detroit symphony orchestra. Asimo, the fulfillment of a two-decade project, can run at six kilometers per hour, kick a football, serve coffee and tea, yield the right of way to an oncoming pedestrian, respond to verbal commands and recognize faces. Honda hopes to have Asimo ready for commercial sale as a receptionist in five years.

Not to be outdone, last December Toyota president Katsuaki Watanabe declared robotics would be one of the company's core businesses within the next decade, and envisioned a society "where robots and humans live side by side." Toyota plans to double the number of its robotics engineers to 200 by 2010. Since 2004, it has showcased its prototype "partner robots," shiny white androids that can carry groceries and play "Moon River" on the violin and trumpet. Partner-robot bands have graced the stage at Washington, D.C.'s Kennedy Center and at the 2005 World's Fair in Japan's Aichi prefecture. The expo's droidfest also featured bots that could draw portraits, paint pottery, carry golf clubs, hit baseballs, sample and identify wine, and ballroom-dance. "I would not be surprised if I see robots taking the place of the elevator conductor in a Tokyo department store," says Masahiro Mori, a pioneer of Japanese robotics.

But the Achilles' heel of Japanese bots is cost effectiveness. Complex designs are expensive, and even the most successful Japanese bots have big price tags. Asimo leases (not very often) for $20,000 a day. Sony's $2,500 robotic dog, Aibo—unveiled in 1999—inspired a cultish following, but after selling 200,000 units, Sony put the dog down in 2006 (along with the rest of its robotics division) over concerns about the bottom line. "The Japanese have not been able to produce a mass-hit product because they're so enamored with the fantasy of creating a robot partner [that acts] like a human being," says Tim Hornyak, author of the robot-industry blog Loving the Machine. "They're just not satisfied with a hockey puck that will go around picking garbage up off your floor."

American firms do not share the burden of sci-fi fantasies. The pragmatic direction of their research is dictated in large part by the U.S. Department of Defense, which provides much of their funding. Roomba gets its ability to cover a surface thoroughly from mine-hunting algorithms developed for military bots. Similarly, Coroware's wheeled Corobot uses technology from U.S. Army unmanned vehicles. Since 2005, iRobot has parlayed this work into several single-purpose workhorse droids. Dirt Dog sweeps decks and garages, Scooba washes floors, Looj cleans gutters, each for under $500. The strategy has paid off: iRobot's on track to increase its $249 million in revenues by 20 percent.