By Chris Velazco

Wander around any big-box electronics store long enough and you may eventually stumble over a handful of domestic robots designed to tidy up after you. They’re probably somewhere near the refrigerators and the washers and dryers, waiting for you to introduce them to a mess.

That’s not exactly the future that decades of speculative fiction foretold. We were promised homes full of intelligent (and sometimes sassy) robotic assistants, not just the cavalcade of glorified, rolling appliances we wound up with. But over the next few years, a new wave of domestic robots could start to do more than just clean up after us.