His co-founder and OpenRov CEO, David Lang says that robots are machines that can sense and actuate.
In the U.S., the Defense Department has been the big spender for robots, seeking machines that can protect soldiers' lives.
With facial characteristics, better intonation, programmed responses to our motions and words, robots now are machines that play on our instincts to communicate and connect.
One-dimensional, repetitive work is exactly what computers, robots and other machines are best at--and what human workers are poorly suited to and almost uniformly despise.
Also making the case was Drew Greenblatt, the widely quoted president and owner of Marlin Steel, a Baltimore manufacturer of steel products that has managed to expand and add jobs by deploying robots and other machines to increase worker productivity.
It is widely agreed that the best way to do this is to bring in more robots, more machines and a greater degree of automation to help speed up production, and workers in the car industry have had to become much more flexible in their attitudes to work.
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It is more likely, he believes, that robots will be relatively dumb machines designed for particular tasks.
Studio Roc offers up its robots, computer controlled milling machines that can do the same amount of work in a matter of hours.
They might sound like the stuff of science fiction, but at their most basic level these medical micro-robots are man-made protein "machines" that produce movement through chemical reactions.
But the Pentagon's plans make all this a bit more complicated: many of its robots will be, in essence, killing machines.
As robots advance into the service industries they are starting to look less like machines and more like living creatures.
"I believe that our center is ahead of a revolution that will see more robots in homes, bypassing some of the fears some people have about machines doing everyday functions in their lives, " Weinberg said.
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Even if the delicate digital hardware running these machines keeps going, and even if they are the smartest roving robots this side of Mars, navigating through the scrub, dust and rock of the Mojave desert represents a complex challenge.
Walking through Oceaneering's warehouse full of boxy robots on stilts, Campbell says people don't realize how far these machines have to travel to monitor the oil that's gushing into the Gulf every day -- or how well-equipped they must be.
It is a menagerie of home-constructed machines including boats, planes, architectural constructions, and prize-winning robots.
"Although robots are sometimes depicted in science fiction movies as having emotions, they are just machines which need people to operate them, " says Ms Litzenberger.
That worry takes on a particularly intense form when the machines come with a human face: Capek's play that gave robots their name depicted a world in which they initially brought lots of benefits but eventually led to mass unemployment and discontent.
The robots were the Roomba, a disc-shaped autonomous vacuum cleaner, and four anthropoid machines of varying degrees of humanness.
The machines aren't the humanoid contraptions many people conjure when they think of robots Lipson's robots consist of a stack of three white plastic cubes that stand as a simple tower.
"If robots are going to arrive in homes, we think that they will be these kind of machines - small, entertaining and fun, " Weinberg said.
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Investing in robots can be worthwhile for mass manufacturers like carmakers, who remain the biggest users of such machines, but even in highly automated car factories people still do most of the final assembly.
Long-term development could nudge us closer to robots with truly general-purpose code -- a welcome relief from the one-track minds the machines often have today.
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Oceaneering leases the machines to oil companies, including BP, but sends its own crew to drive the complicated robots from boats on the surface of the water.
The military currently has as many as 3, 500 robots in Afghanistan, from small contraptions that a soldier can pitch through a window to bulldozer-size machines that can plow over mine-seeded roads.
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Using machines not made for such conditions was "always a compromise", he said, and better robots were needed.
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