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Hidden away in a lab in north-west London three black metal robotic hands move eerily on an engineering work bench. No claws, or pincers, but four fingers and a thumb opening and closing slowly, with joints in all the right places.

"We're not trying to build Terminator," jokes Rich Walker, director of Shadow Robot, the firm that made them.

Bespectacled, with long hair and a beard and moustache, he seems more like a latter-day hippy than a tech whizz, and he is clearly proud as he shows me around his firm.

"We set out to build the robot that helps you, that makes your life better, your general-purpose servant that can do anything around the home, do all the housework..."

But there's a deeper ambition: to address one of the UK's most pressing challenges - the escalating crisis in social care.

There were 131,000 vacancies for adult care workers in England, a report by charity, Skills for Care, found last year. And in all, around two million people aged 65 and over in England are living with unmet care needs, according to Age UK.

By 2050, one in four people in the UK is expected to be aged 65 or over, potentially putting more strain still on the care system.

Which is where robots come in.

The previous government announced a £34m investment in developing robots that could potentially be used to give care. It went as far as saying, in 2019, that "within the next 20 years, autonomous systems like… robots will become a normal part of our lives, transforming the way we live, work and travel."

Could this "techno-solutionism" - which sounds more like something out of a sci-fi film - really be the solution? And would you really trust your elderly relatives, or yourself when you're at your most vulnerable with what is essentially a very strong machine?

Japan offers a peek into a future with robots living among us.

Ten years ago, its government began offering subsidies to robot manufacturers to develop and popularise the use of robots in care homes - fuelled in part by an ageing population and relative lack of care home staff.

Dr James Wright, an AI specialist and visiting professor at Queen Mary University of London, spent seven months observing them. And specifically, looking at how well they worked in a Japanese care home.

In all, three types of robots were studied: the first, called HUG, was designed by Fuji Corporation in Japan and looked like a highly sophisticated walking frame. It had support pads that people could lean right into, and it helped carers lift people from bed to, say, a wheelchair or the toilet.

The second, meanwhile, looked a bit like a baby seal and was called Paro. This robot, intended to stimulate dementia patients, was trained to respond to being stroked through movements and sounds.

The third was a small friendly-looking humanoid robot called Pepper. It could give instructions and also demonstrate exercises by moving its arms - and was used to lead exercise classes........

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