Is Einstein Robot too human? | Robot wars of the future | Calls for 'Model-T robot' | Robot childminders? Not just yet | Blog: the robot receptionist | Comment: tomorrow's dominant life-form

Sitting on Tomomasa Sato's coffee table, dog-eared and bristling with Post-it Notes, is the Japanese translation of the World Health Organisation's International Classification of Functioning. It is a mighty work, laying out everything that we human beings can do.

“This book is my target,” says Professor Sato, casting an arm around his lab. “Everything in it is a goal to me. Open it at any page and I want to build a robot that can do whatever it says on that page.”

He skips the early sections on “basic” human functions such as sitting upright and identifying sources of sound, and heads straight for the later chapters. In the Activities and Participation section, he stops at sub-clause d7500 - “Creating and maintaining friendship relationships that are characterised by mutual esteem and common interests”.

He laughs nervously. “Robots that can make real friends - now that will be tough. Very tough. If we are going to construct a robot that functions and thinks like a human, then every line in this book represents decades, maybe even centuries, of science, research and work that we still have to do.”

The enormity of this undertaking does not appear to daunt Sato, who is head of Tokyo University's faculty of mechano-informatics and chairman of the Japan Robotics Association.

Robots, he explains, will one day be viewed not merely as “nice to have” but as “vital to have”. Partly, he admits, this is because the Japanese population is ageing so fast. But he also contends that robots will be the great emancipators of their flesh-bound creators: strong, untiring and programmed to undertake what we cannot or will not do ourselves.

In Sato's mind, robots are a modern-day extension of the instincts, interests and skills that have driven Japanese people for millennia, which is why the seemingly impossible quest to get a robot to simulate all functions of a human is pursued with such enthusiasm here. His office and the research centres near by hum with the sort of mesmerising boffinry that we associate with Q's lab or the bridge of Jules Verne's Nautilus.

Near Sato's desk stands a dormant yellow robot, its rubber hands drooping on the end of fiendishly complex metallic joints. Various cameras and sensors are mounted awkwardly about its body. Sato is vague about what it actually does. Its brother can wash dishes. But his lurid mechanised companion does illustrate what Japan wants its robots to be: sentient and servile, capable but cute.

While he admires British and American mechanical engineering, the professor scoffs at Western television competitions in the Robot Wars mould, in which youngsters' creations are pitted against each other in a fight. Japanese robot competitions involve setting an obscenely complex task (eg, balance a candle on a 10ft pole and light it), and getting children to construct robots that will perform it.

To say that the Japanese are fervent about robots is a great understatement. Major corporations devote colossal resources to robot design. In the past six months alone, the Japanese consumer has been offered more than ten robotic products for entertainment or home use.

Commercial robot offerings that have made the jump from lab to real world include the £20,000 Mechatroid Type C robot office receptionist, which can greet visitors, recognise people who have visited before and address them by name, and direct them to the right part of the building when asked. Also on sale is a family-orientated blogging robot that roams around your home, regularly updating an internet blog with photographs and brief comments.

Japanese robophilia is a futurist cult without the violence. Its core belief is that robots are marching benignly and inexorably into our homes and lives, where they will play as central a role later this century as the internet and the combustion engine do now. The second tenet of this faith is that robots will look and behave like people.

“Yes, we are a nation that loves mechanics and adores the concept of monozukuri (thing-making),” says Sato, “but there is more than just that in our love of robots. We tend to see things as possessing their own lives. Perhaps it is a Buddhist set of views. We see and name things in Nature as if they were people, and do the same with robots. Of course, that influences the way they look.”

He is also quick to acknowledge the more prosaic role played by manga comics and animation - a genre of pop entertainment enjoyed by all Japanese age groups that historically has depicted robots as the obedient, powerful allies of human heroes, rather than their enemies.

Along the corridor from Sato's office, laboratories have been set up to resemble bedrooms or kitchens, and young engineers fiddle with synthetic arms from which spew tangles of coloured wires. In one room, a group is working on a robot that remembers where you last put a particular object: say to it firmly “today's copy of The Times” and it should respond “in your briefcase, 15 minutes ago”.

The key to creating useful robots will be dramatic improvements in artificial intelligence. American roboteers, the professor acknowledges, have attacked the software side of the challenge with the same vigour that the Japanese have worked on the mechanical engineering. Closer links between the two are overdue, but the main advances will probably come only when computing power can be harnessed at greater levels and in smaller spaces than is now achievable, he says.

“The next stage is to be able to tell a robot to fetch something from somewhere in the house without breaking it. This sounds basic because it is simple for us. But it's not - it is at the limit of our science.”

Building a robot that can perform even a fraction of the human functions described in the WHO book is an enterprise that Sato knows will require many more years than he has left on earth. What he would like to see, though, is the completion of what he calls the “Robot Apollo Mission” (though it is nothing to do with robots in space).

“The word has come to represent the entire concept of pioneering into new territory,” he says. “In the field of robots, the final frontier is not outer space but the homes where we live. Making a robot understand our homes and our lives is much, much more complicated than landing a person on Mars.”

This, he says, is one of the main reasons why Japanese robot-makers have devoted so much time and effort to creating humanoid robots - a pursuit viewed by US roboteers as an unnecessarily complicated blind alley. But he dismisses the idea that wheeled, non-humanoid robots are a better idea: “The world we live in is designed for and lived in by people. Robots have to fit in with our lives rather than forcing us to change - which means that they must function like us.”

Explore Tech & Web

• Personal Tech

• The Web

• Gadgets & Gaming