As children, many of us watched TV shows like The Jetsons and dreamed about the day we might have our own robot maids, mechanics, and assistants. Evolution Robotics says it's making this happen.

The Pasadena, Calif., company has released an operating system designed for the personal-robotics industry and says it hopes to do for that industry what Windows did for the PC.

The Evolution Robotics Software Platform contains everything a company needs to develop and program robots, says Jennifer McNally, the company's senior director of marketing. It consists of a robot-control architecture, core software modules, and a set of developer's tools, she says.

Much like a PC operating system, Evolution's platform contains the basic system that controls a robot, as well as lots of smaller components and drivers to operate voice recognition or control a particular tool, for example.

Robotics makers can license the whole system or just pieces. They can program robots either by combining pieces of the platform's code by hand or by using a graphical user interface to create entire robot behavioral applications. "If I wanted to create a robot application to get me a beer, it would have to know how to recognize a beer, move forward, grasp the bottle, and bring it back," McNally says.

The operating system is available for Linux computers and a Windows version is in the works. Commercial robots running on the system should be out by the end of 2003, McNally says, and could take the form of anything from computerized vacuum cleaners to robotic lawn mowers.

"The industry could benefit from a standard platform," says Vijay Kumar, a professor in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania, who teaches robotics. But he's skeptical as to whether Evolution Robotics can make a go of it. Says Kumar, "There have been other attempts to do this that have failed."