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The word robot comes from robota, Czech for drudgery, and it will be welcome news to many parents that researchers are working on a robot that will tidy a child's bedroom.

Medhat Moussa, an engineering professor at the University of Guelph, has even conducted experiments involving getting a robot to pick up teddy bears of different shapes and sizes.

It is this process - teaching a robot to pick up a room - that Dr. Moussa is trying to perfect. It will have to be easier than getting a child to pick up toys and clothes, or no one is going to fork out thousands of dollars for a mechanical maid.

"We want a little robot that walks into the room when it is tidy, takes pictures and knows where things should be. Once the kid goes to school, he picks up different things and places them where [they are] supposed to be," he says.

But there are challenges. Messy rooms have hard objects on the floor, such as books or baseballs, as well as delicate items like jewellery and soft toys, like teddy bears.

While our brains automatically assess the force and grip required for different objects, a robot will have to learn these skills. That's where parents come in. It will be their job to help a robot learn how to manage everything from Lego to Frisbees.

Dr. Moussa wants to make this process as painless as possible. He and colleague Maria Ralph are studying how ordinary people communicate with robots in hopes of building a machine that even technophobes will be able to teach to clean up a messy bedroom or perform other household chores.

They recently recruited a group of volunteers who were uneasy with new technology.

"We wanted people who had difficulty programming their VCRs," says Dr. Moussa.

The volunteers' task was to command a robot to pick up five things: a comb, a spoon, a pair of scissors, a set of tweezers and a tensor-bandage clip. The robot's arm was the same size as a human arm, and had a two-fingered gripper. The volunteers were given a set of commands they could use, including move up, move down, tilt up, tilt down, open and close.A human operator was in the room with them, and typed the commands into the computer that controlled the robot.

The team discovered that the novice users didn't bother with complex commands, but relied on a few simple instructions to get the robot to grasp all five objects.

Once they had success with the spoon, they tended to use the same commands over and over again with the other objects.

The experiment also involved another group of volunteers who were more comfortable with computers and new technology. While they were faster at getting the robot to grasp objects, they, too, used a few simple commands.

This means, says Dr. Moussa, it will be easier than he expected to teach a robot to pick up objects in a messy room and place them in their proper spots.

A robot that will respond to a few simple commands - not dozens of different complex ones - may be all that is required, he says. Once a robot learns to pick up a particular object - like a necklace - it will remember how to do it the next time.

There are already robots that help clean houses. Roomba and Scooba, flying-saucer-shaped robots sold by the Massachusetts company iRobot, now vacuum and mop floors in more than two million North American households.

Dr. Moussa is working on a more general-purpose household robot, one that could be taught to do a variety of tasks, including emptying the dishwasher or fetching a bottle of medicine.

A very basic model could be available in five years, he says, although there are ethical and liability issues to consider. What happens, for example, if a robot hurts someone, rolls over a little toe, or knocks a toddler down the stairs? What if it brings the wrong bottle of pills to an elderly owner, who doesn't notice and takes them anyway?

"This is a big, big hurdle," Dr. Moussa says.

Still, he is convinced that in the not-so-distant future, people who can afford it will have a robotic maid - albeit one that doesn't look anything remotely like a human, because humanoids are too expensive to build and not very practical.

But even the best-trained robot may have trouble with a really messy room. As a parent, Dr. Moussa knows that sometimes clutter can carpet the floor. It might be tough for a robot to pick out the teddy pair from the dirty clothes.

"Recognizing what should be picked up can be difficult."