More and more robots are being designed to handle the jobs now done by white-collar office workers. For instance, the HRP-4 humanoid robot ($350,000), developed by Kawada Industries, is designed to pour coffee, deliver mail, and recognize its co-workers’ faces.

The QB, another office robot, is a “remote presence robot” designed to reduce the need for business travel. The QB is controlled through a Web browser and keyboard, and will “stand in” for the physical body of a human. According to Anybots’ founder, hundreds have been sold to date.

For around the same price, the company Smart Robots sells a general-purpose office robot called the SR4. The SR4 is capable of navigating through an office building, picking things up, dropping things off and generally saving humans labor. More advanced robots, like the $400,000 PR2 developed by Willow Garage, can do basic problem solving, open doors by themselves, and automatically plug themselves in for recharging. They can also fetch food from a refrigerator and play pool with humans.