Household robots are cleaning up

we've entered the robotic age at last. It's no longer just hi-tech car production lines that can enjoy the benefits of automated service - the robots have moved into our homes too.

Electrolux announced last week that the world's first robotic vacuum cleaner is already available to buy in the shops. The Trilobite, as it's called, looks rather like a cross between a hovercraft, a spare tyre and a toilet seat. A thing of beauty it isn't - but who cares what it looks like? It claims to do away with the need for conventional vacuum cleaning and will navigate its way around your rooms whilst you put your feet up, using sound waves to detect obstacles like furniture and plants in its path. It will suck up household dirt without any need for either supervision or elbow grease, and will even re-charge itself if it runs out of steam mid-way through cleaning. Now that's progress.

With a price tag of £999, the Trilobite is hardly within the price range of Joe Public just yet. But its release hints that the age of the robot and automated cleaning systems, predicted for so long, is finally here. So what can we look forward to in the future? A robotic bed-maker? An ironing robot who'll both do the ironing and put the freshly-laundered and folded sheets away for you afterwards? Or a dust-o-matic, who'll faithfully whisk away every speck of dust without once threatening to break your favourite vase?

Sadly, however inventive we are, we're never going to be able to do away with housework altogether, says Brian Davies, the Project Services Manager for AMX UK Ltd, an American-owned company based at Clifton Moor which designs and sells smart home technology. "You are never going to do away with arms and legs, but we can make things like housework a lot easier for people."

Brian's vision of the future in the next ten to 20 years is one where your home itself is automated - where you'll be able to run a bath by calling home from your mobile, or make sure that your favourite TV or radio programme is on when you walk through the door. You'll be able to use your PC anywhere in the house without the need for wires and you'll have an automated lawn-mower to cut your grass. In fact, he says that there are plenty of homes out there already where this sort of technology is already installed - albeit for a select few with enough cash stashed away to pay for it.

"I have one client who has a home in Cyprus," says Brian. "He can check over the internet whether or not his cleaner has come in, how long she was there for and can even see what temperature it is in his home over there and adjust his heating as well."

The reality is that while to us mere mortals the Trilobite vacuum cleaner may look like a revolution, this sort of technology has been available for years to those people with the money to pay for it. "Mostly automated homes are for someone who has a lot of money and they don't know what to spend it on," says Brian. But he also claims that many of the people who invest in home automation systems are concerned with security rather than sheer comfort alone. It is possible to set up a connection, for example, that allows the home owner access to their security system via the internet while abroad or out of town. You could be conducting business in the Australian outback and still see who was at your front door in Poppleton. You could even talk to them through your intercom system as though you were at home.

What is changing is the cost. "What you can expect to see in the next ten to 20 years is that the things that we are doing now for millionaires will be available for the average man in the street," says Brian.

But how will the great British technophobe deal with all this readily available hi-tech equipment when the prices come down, as they inevitably will? How will we live with the Trilobite, the ability to appear at home to visitors when actually out to lunch, to conduct business at the click of a button? It doesn't matter how swish or advanced - or even simple to understand - the equipment. There will always be some of us who just can't get to grips with it.

"Did you see The Osbournes?" asks Brian. "Well that thing Ozzy Osbourne was swearing at was an AMX system. It's a hand-held remote control system that allows him to choose the channel on a plasma screen."

At a minimal level, then, technology can bring all your hand-held controls into one. From there it seems the sky's the limit - assuming that we all take to smart home technology a bit better than Ozzy did, that is.

Updated: 09:31 Thursday, May 22, 2003