In the original 'Star Wars' movie, there is a small toaster-sized and shaped robot on the Death Star that guides Stormtroopers to where they need to go. I always liked that robot because I could imagine how to build it - and it served a real purpose.

The utility of the robot needs to come first. It's business model over technology.

The answer is navigation, manipulation, and implementation of more sophisticated intelligence. The idea that a robot will become more aware of its environment, that telling it to "go to the kitchen" means something - navigation and understanding of the environment is a robot problem. Those are the technological frontiers of the robotics industry.

I think, people are generally willing to imagine robots of all shapes, as humanoid robots are not practical.

Building robot versions of people is very expensive.

In the end, robots do things that people can do. So there is a cost above which you can hire somebody to do it, and that bounds the opportunity.

Hollywood likes to imagine robots as mechanical copies of ourselves - which is a terrible idea.