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VANCOUVER — In a meeting room at the University of British Columbia, a crowd of more than one hundred volunteers is eagerly lined up to experience something that, to later generations, will seem remarkably quaint.

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They came for the chance to be handed something by a robot.

“Charlie,” a $400,000 humanoid research robot, picks up a water bottle, briefly glances at the drink and then gently extends the offering, its two camera eyes rising to meet the gaze of the human receiver. And then does it over and over again.

The basic, two-second act — during a demonstration three months ago — was the result of months of research, hundreds of trials and hours upon hours of finicky programming.

Everything about it, from the low swoop of Charlie’s arm, to the complex math underlying the water bottle’s effortless handoff, had been painstakingly engineered to make the motion imperceptibly seamless.