Is man’s best friend a robot’s worst enemy?

Last month, Gartner vice president Jackie Fenn suggested that mobile robots are among the technologies that have “begun to be interesting to business”. So what’s happening in mobile and general robotics? You need to know, because it might be a moment to be disturbed about what pitbull terriers might do to the market.

Yes, pitbull terriers. A pitbull terrier can be trained, it seems, to take laundry out of a washing machine, divest you of your socks and open doors for you (including the fridge). As you may have read, in August Seoul National University and RNL Bio, a Korean company, cloned five pitbull terriers from a dad whose capabilities as a “service dog” includes all those tricks. Price? About £80,000 each.

Yes, yes, we all know that the big market for stationary and mobile robots still lies, respectively, in automotive and military applications. I once interviewed Joseph F Engelberger, founder of America’s pioneer of the genre, Unimation. In 1984, after Fiat’s “Handbuilt by robots” advertising campaign, I helped put a big welding robot on show at an exhibition of robots at the Victoria & Albert Museum. I’m even aware that the sinisterly named British Robot Association of old has for some years been the British Automation and Robot Association (Bara).

Yet Bara statistics show that, since 2000, the annual number of industrial robots installed in British industry has fallen from a high of nearly 2,000, to fewer than 1,000. And now I fear that clever dogs cloned in South Korea could one day challenge mobile robots for supremacy.

In Bedford, Massachusetts, iRobot Corporation just might be worried. It’s true that the firm, which is quoted on Nasdaq, does plenty of business with the US Department of Defense. iRobot has also just announced Robot Negotiator, “a low-cost tactical robot designed to meet the reconnaissance needs of public safety professionals”.

From the fourth quarter of 2008, US policemen, firemen and private security guards will have a new colleague. But if cloned pitbull terriers get any more ingenious, iRobot’s booming home robot division may face a long-term threat.

It’s not likely that even cloned dogs will ever be given the DNA to go vacuum cleaning and floor washing, like iRobot’s Roomba and Scooba machines do. And it’s true that robots like these are helping iRobot finally break even after being founded by MIT roboticists in 1990. Boosted by burgeoning demand outside the US, iRobot has so far sold more than three million Roombas at $200 to $530 (£110 to £300), and could have a turnover of $250m (£140m) by the end of this year.

Yet as iRobot chief executive Colin Angle told the 36 million members of the American Association of Retired Persons, the really big market opening up for home robots will be among ageing baby-boomers already used to a Roomba or a Scooba; and for that market, where communication, medication and all-round therapy are likely to be the things valued, cloned pitbull terriers might have the edge over mobile IT.

Compared with conventional home robots, cloned dogs could well be cuddlier and more personable. Anyway, while clinical studies suggest that dogs keep older people alive longer, as yet there’s not much evidence that robots do.

Pitbull terriers might even be trained to notice if you’ve taken your pills or not. And they can certainly wear webcams to keep track of you, so that doctors and nurses can do a remote check-up.

It could be a whole new battle for the living room ­ not between Betamax and VHS, or Sony’s Blu-Ray and Toshiba’s HD-DVD, but between those two titans, electronics and genetics.