Is this the year domestic robots come in our homes?

The industry for humanoid robots in general in China is in fact so hot that the government recently warned there was a risk of a bubble building that might burst if the robots aren't as successful or popular as they hope.

The International Federation of Robotics thinks it could take 20 years before domestic bots become truly useful and accepted.

There are questions too about how much demand there will actually be for the bots. Will they just be the play things of the rich or will they become cheap enough for mainstream use in the same way that robot hoovers have become?

But for the engineers at the forefront of this technology there appears to be a confidence that they are truly building a future that all of us will want in our homes. Engineers are using all sorts of different robotic arms, hands and bodies to develop AI software for any robot hardware.

"We want to be able to breathe intelligence into any sort of physical embodiment, whether that's a humanoid robot or even something that looks closer to an appliance," says co-founder Chelsea Finn.

Their approach is being excitedly backed by investors including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and OpenAI.

There's a huge amount of investment going into this technology and although Silicon Valley is once again an epicentre, it is facing tough competition from Chinese rivals. Skip to content

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Eggie, Neo, Isaac and Memo are domestic robots. But would you let them load your dishwasher?

The idea of having a friendly robot butler that can do all the dull duties of running a home has existed for decades.

But now, thanks to AI, it's genuinely happening and this year the first truly multi-purpose domestic bots will start to enter homes.

In Silicon Valley, they're being trained at speed to fold laundry, load the dishwasher, and clean up after us.

Their excitable human creators are making big promises but I wanted to see how realistic the idea of a robot housekeeper really is.

So I went to meet Eggie, NEO, Isaac and Memo.

It is impossible not to smile when one of these humanoid or partly humanoid (no legs) bots enters a room.