But soon they may also control some household robots that can trundle around living rooms, doing useful jobs.

One robot in development at an Atlanta laboratory is commanded by humans with an ordinary laser pointer, the same kind used by lecturers presenting slide shows. Here, though, the pointer tells a robot what to fetch. Shine its bright light on a dropped medicine bottle on the floor, and the robot will go to the spot, retrieve the bottle and roll back with it.

The robot doesn’t yet say, "Your medicine bottle, sir," but that may also happen someday, said Charlie Kemp, an assistant professor and roboticist in the department of biomedical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

This dexterous robot may be especially helpful in assisting people with severely restricted mobility -- for instance, those with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Kemp was inspired to create the robotic system partly because of what he had learned about helper monkeys. These animals fetch objects for quadriplegics who hold laser pointers in their mouths and shine them on items they want retrieved.

He named his one-armed robot El-E (pronounced "Ellie"), because, among other reasons, her lifting style reminded him of an elephant using its trunk.

El-E’s novel interface, the laser pointer, is important because it simplifies a tricky, longstanding problem basic to getting a robot to fetch, said Gaurav S. Sukhatme, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Southern California, who has played with El-E at the Atlanta lab.

Just pointing to an object with natural gestures usually isn’t enough to direct a robot, and even when robots navigate to the right spot, it’s hard for them to grasp a particular object unless, for instance, they have a three-dimensional computer model of it, Kemp said. Guided by the laser pointer, though, El-E can fetch objects as varied as towels, wallets or coffee mugs with no need for elaborate computer modeling. The laser pointer has its limits: The object being retrieved has to be in a line of sight with it. If the object is behind a bookshelf, or in the next room, the beam won’t get there.

The robot is far from a consumer item just yet; it is a laboratory prototype, about to be tested with patients at the ALS Center at the Emory University School of Medicine.