In a regular building in Menlo Park, there is a small army of personal robots quietly at work. They are learning to put dishes in and out of the dishwasher, fold clothes, play pool, lift and ferry cups without breaking or dropping them and fetch people their individual choices of beer. These are the personal robots of Willow Garage , a start-up firm that expects robots to become as ubiquitous as personal computers

“Just as the Xerox Alto catalysed the PC industry in the early 1970s, Willow Garage expects its PR2 robot to bring the promise of personal robotics closer to today’s homes and businesses,” says CEO and former Xerox veteran Steve Cousins

The PR2, Willow Garage’s star robot, is a chubby humanoid that will do pretty much anything for you, as long as you can write an app for it to do so. So electronic appliance maker Bosch has adopted a PR2 for two years, named it Alan and is teaching it to do household chores such as woodcarving, fetching drinks, setting up a breakfast table, folding clothes, drawing on a whiteboard, delivering mail and so on.

“We have set out to fulfill that dream of having robots in our lives every day, the collective dream that our society has had since the 1960s with the Jetsons,” says Brian Gerkey, director of open source development at Willow Garage. The timing could not have been more propitious. Sensors that help robots perceive their environment and act are coming up fast.

Microsoft Kinect, a motion-sensing device used in gaming but also in robots including Willow Garage’s Turtlebot, came out last year. A fullfledged apps ecosystem is in place, which could inspire a similar apps ecosystem for personal robots. ABI Research estimates the personal robotics market to top $19 billion in 2017.

Willow Garage has also made an open source robotic operating system ROS, on which anyone proficient in Linux will be able to build apps. But personal robotics has not taken off the way it was meant to be, mainly because people could not collaborate on software and hardware. When something such as the ROS is put together with a robotic platform such as the PR2, this gap may essentially be filled.

Consequently, Willow Garage could do for personal robotics, what the iPhone and Android have done for mobile phones. Despite multiple appliances in a home such as dishwashers, washing machines, dryers and microwave ovens capable of doing complex tasks autonomously, they are not integrated well. Dishes have to be stacked, plates ferried from oven to table.

“This is where people spend their time doing chores and this is the first space that personal robots can help,” says Gerkey. A great example of this is Roomba, the vacuuming bot that is arguably the most popular personal robot today. Unlike a regular vacuum cleaner that we need to operate ourselves, Roomba hovers around cleaning up by itself, navigating around obstacles such as table legs and plugs itself in for a recharge when it senses its battery draining out.

However, Willow Garage wants PR2 to not only relieve us of such chores, but also go beyond to assistive functions. When programmed, PR2 could be more of a robotic helper to the elderly or to those with mobility constraints: opening doors, sorting out their medication and helping them take it on time, alerting their doctors if symptoms occur, and so on. However, perception and planning are big challenges for robots. The PR2 for instance, tends to get confused with transparent glass surfaces.

“These systems need to work 24/7 and be as reliable as our automobiles and refrigerators, safety engineering is also a must,” says Ronald C Arkin, a robotics professor at Georgia Tech and a roboticist with the IEEE technological standards body.

Luckily for Willow Garage, it does not need a revenue stream to live off, like most startups that need to build a product for the next market cycle. It is backed by a secret circle of Silicon Valley angels who have given the company financial freedom to focus completely on R&D. Today, the PR2 is at the stage where the Xerox Alto and the Homebrew Clubs of the PC revolution were once at. “It is a fantastic opportunity to bring robots out of the factory floors and labs and into our everyday lives,” says Gerkey.