THE ANNOUNCEMENT IN November 2013 by Amazon’s boss, Jeff Bezos, that he wanted to use drones for deliveries was, to many in the industry, something of a stretch. Applying drones safely on such a scale without line-of-sight control, and re-engineering the company’s logistics model accordingly, would be a big undertaking. But it generated a lot of media interest, and just in time for Christmas, too. His company’s most serious commitment to robotics to date—its acquisition in early 2012 of Kiva, a company whose robots move shelves around in warehouses—got far less attention. This is one example of a pervasive quality of robotic technology: the high visibility of its promises and the near-invisibility of its successes.

In the 1990s Danny Hillis, a computer scientist and entrepreneur, pointed out that when people talk about “technology” they really mean “everything that doesn’t work yet”; once technologies work they simply become computers, televisions, phones and the like. Robots suffer from a similar double standard. When they are seen as providing a reliable, routine solution to a problem—cleaning floors, for example—in some ways they cease being seen as robots. Conversely, as long as they continue to be seen as robots, they may seem experimental and bug-prone. One entrepreneur who recently used the word “robotics” in the name of a fledgling company is already having second thoughts, worrying that customers will expect the products to be both higher-tech and less reliable than they are.

It is quite easy to imagine a future in which “robots” remain an esoteric subject of public fascination even as more and more services are automated with techniques developed in robotics laboratories. Take Aethon, a Pittsburgh company that makes robots for hospitals. Its Tug robots, limbless and faceless, are uncharismatic but reliable heavy-duty trundlebots designed to move hospital trolleys around. Aethon’s boss, Aldo Zini, says he has come across hospitals where porters have to move dirty-linen carts weighing 350kg; such jobs carry a significant risk of injury and have a very high turnover. They fit the “dull, dangerous and dirty” category perfectly.

Aethon’s Tugs can be summoned with a smartphone app and attached to a trolley carrying pharmaceuticals, diagnostic materials, meals or laundry. About 150 hospitals, mostly in America, already use them. In some of those hospitals they could soon be running into (not literally; they have collision-avoidance systems) other trundlebots. The Ava made by iRobot is a pedestal that can navigate around a building it has got to know, and onto which various types of “telepresence” packages can be mounted. One application has high-resolution cameras and other sensors designed for diagnostic work, allowing patients to benefit remotely from the skills of specialists in other places. Another application is to move terminals for videoconferencing equipment to where they are needed, allowing conversations to take place on the factory floor or walking down a corridor.

Suitable Technologies, another Willow Garage spin-off, is now also selling a telepresence system, Beam, based on a sort of trundlebot. The move was inspired by seeing the in-house success of a gadget put together by Willow Garage staff that let an engineer living in Indiana participate more fully in the company’s life in Palo Alto. Similarly, Paolo Pirjanian, iRobot’s chief technology officer, who lives in California, uses an Ava system that allows him to be a more or less daily presence at the company’s Massachusetts headquarters; his colleagues say he is “there” much more than he could ever be if he used only phone, e-mail, instant messaging and Skype. When he wants to move from one floor of the building to another, he simply logs out of one Ava 500 and on to one on the next floor; his abandoned chariot will trundle back to its charging point unsupervised.

This is just one of the solutions robot designers have had to find for the lift problem. Aethon’s Tugs are equipped with a wireless system for summoning them. Suitable Technologies recommends different Beams for different floors. The rather charming CoBot at Carnegie Mellon, on the other hand, relies on the kindness of strangers, standing by the lift door displaying a little sign asking passers-by please to press the appropriate button for it.

What self-navigating robots do not do when they want to travel in a lift is use their arms to press the buttons. Arms, and the software that tells a robot what to do with them, are expensive and fallible things. Away from the highly regimented world of the production line, they are worth investing in only if they are vital to the tasks that the robot has, as it were, at hand: if it needs to change something in its environment in the way a human would. And to a large extent, success in practical service robotics has revolved around choosing or designing tasks that do not require changes of that kind.

Both Mr Angle of iRobot and Mr Zini of Aethon are very keen on the word “practical”. Their companies sell systems that solve problems for a lot of people, companies and institutions in a way that would not be possible without robots; but since robots currently have many shortcomings, those systems have to be designed in a way that minimises their responsibilities as well as the need for human supervision. Mr Angle stresses that the right business plan is crucial. His company got well down the road towards developing robots for commercial floor-cleaning before realising it did not have the right model for the business.

A robot by any other name

What gets a robot seen as a robot is, to a large extent, its ability to do different things, of which the arm can be seen as an emblem; businesses which design their solutions in such a way that what the robot does, though crucial, is also highly constrained, may in effect make their robots invisible. In a decade or so trolleys moving around hospital corridors unsupervised will just be trolleys, no more meriting special attention than doors that open automatically when someone approaches them. In Japan such automation, from self-driving cars to camera autofocus, is called robotech, to differentiate it from robots proper. Growth in robotech will allow robotics companies to make money without filling the world with things thought of as robots. They will simply be supplying non-factory automation that works.

This goes far wider than trundlebots in hospitals. For a very different form of constructive invisibility, consider Bot & Dolly, a San Francisco company that uses industrial-robot arms for art projects. The company has developed a way to mesh the software used to control robot arms with the software that visual-effects makers use to plot out what is on a movie screen frame by frame. That enables film-makers such as Alfonso Cuarón, who used Bot & Dolly to spin cameras and lights around Sandra Bullock and George Clooney in “Gravity”, to move a camera along any trajectory they choose without knowing anything about robotics. All they need to know is what they need to see at which angle. How the robot achieves that is not their problem.

Perhaps the most pervasive invisibility will be achieved by robots on the road. Self-driving cars are “hard-core robotics”, says Sebastian Thrun, who masterminded Google’s self-driving-car programme. His former colleagues at Carnegie Mellon, meanwhile, have been working with GM on automating cars. Thanks to all this work, along with a great deal more funding than any academic robotics programme would ever garner, self-driving cars are now a practical possibility.

They are not yet a business (a Google car would still cost far too much to put into production, even if the regulatory framework were to allow its widespread use), and it is not clear how they will turn into one. But although there are technical and business challenges still to be overcome, the idea that within a decade or so cars will be increasingly able to drive themselves is now widely accepted as plausible, even if the details are hazy. And it is a safe bet that the more capable, acceptable and thus widespread self-driving cars become, the less they will be seen as robots and the more as just cars.