Robby the Robot and C-3PO may still be years away from reality, but robot vacuum cleaners, medical robots, surveillance robots, underwater robots and demolition robots are here now.

And rather than replacing the human work force, robots are creating a booming job market for engineers, software developers and other technical professionals, experts say.

American Honda Motor Co. is touring the country with the company’s Asimo robot (http://asimo.honda.com), visiting schools to show off the two-legged “bot to students and spread awareness of careers in the robotics industry.

Asimo project leader Stephen Keeney said he hopes to make young students aware of how many different paths there are in the robotics profession.

To create Asimo, “It takes people who understand mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer scientists such as hardware and software developers, it includes people who understand mathematics,” said Keeney. “And it includes professions that might not come immediately to mind, people like chemists and physiologists.”

Keeney said Honda’s work on domestic robots like Asimo will benefit the health care industry especially, where the shortage of human workers is only likely to worsen.

“We don’t look at robotics as a way to replace people,” he said. “We’re looking for Asimo to be something that can help augment the human caregivers out there.”

While Asimo and Sony’s Aibo pets garner the most headlines, the United Nations said in an annual industry report in October that the demand for robots is expected to grow over the next several years.

Dan Kara, president of trade journal Robotics Trends, said that most of the new robotics jobs will probably be in the field of service robots.

“That would be things like robotic surgical devices, robotic sewer cleaners, entertainment robots and household robots like the Roomba,” he said.

The U.N. said that at the end of 2003, there were 610,000 robotic vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers in operation worldwide. Over the next three years, roughly 4 million more new self-controlled vacuums and mowers are expected to invade homes and yards.

Kara said that most of the new robotics jobs are concentrated in three areas: Silicon Valley, Pittsburgh and Boston – home of iRobot, the company behind the Roomba vacuum cleaner.

While Pittsburgh may not seem the most likely epicenter of robotic development, it is the home of Carnegie Mellon University, which has one of the largest robotics research labs in the country, Kara said.

But unlike some cutting-edge fields like biotechnology or nanotechnology, robotics doesn’t require doctorate-level credentials to get in the door.

“Surprisingly, most of the people we hire to work, say, in our engineering department and our factories, they usually have bachelor of science degrees,” Keeney said. “We would prefer to take someone who has a very solid understanding of science in general and then teach them what specifically they need to know to work with Honda.”

“Of course, we always do appreciate people who specialize,” he added. “For the artificial intelligence aspect of Asimo, we may need someone whose focus is cognitive machine thinking, and for that you may need a Ph.D.”

Kara said that while the military and multinational firms such as Honda, Sony and Toyota are major players in the robotics field, home brewers are getting into the act.

“When Asimo came out, people realized you could build a robot that walked like a person pretty well, although it took about $100 million,” he said. “Now, you have people in garages building smaller robots that can do the same thing for about $1,000.”

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PHOTO (from KRT Photo Service, 202-383-6099): WRK-ROBOTS

AP-NY-11-16-04 0620EST