These robots can clean, exercise - and care for your elderly parents. Would you trust them to?

3 hours ago Share Save Pallab Ghosh Science Correspondent Share Save

BBC

Listen to Pallab reading this article Hidden away in a lab in north-west London three black metal robotic hands move eerily on an engineering work bench. No claws, or pincers, but four fingers and a thumb opening and closing slowly, with joints in all the right places. "We're not trying to build Terminator," jokes Rich Walker, director of Shadow Robot, the firm that made them. Bespectacled, with long hair and a beard and moustache, he seems more like a latter-day hippy than a tech whizz, and he is clearly proud as he shows me around his firm. "We set out to build the robot that helps you, that makes your life better, your general-purpose servant that can do anything around the home, do all the housework..." But there's a deeper ambition: to address one of the UK's most pressing challenges - the escalating crisis in social care.

AFP via Getty Images Pepper, this small humanoid robot, has led exercise classes with residents of one care home

There were 131,000 vacancies for adult care workers in England, a report by charity, Skills for Care, found last year. And in all, around two million people aged 65 and over in England are living with unmet care needs, according to Age UK. By 2050, one in four people in the UK expected to be aged 65 or over, potentially putting more strain still on the care system. Which is where robots come in. The previous government announced a £34m investment in developing robots that could potentially be used to give care. It went as far as saying, in 2019, that "within the next 20 years, autonomous systems like… robots will become a normal part of our lives, transforming the way we live, work and