How long will it be before these become mainstream reality?
The main obstacle to mainstream adoption is currently cost. For instance if robotic porters were availabile this would massively streamline patient logistics in a hospital. However, at present they cost far more than human porters.
This is an example of a tele-opetated robotic system. What will come next will be semiautonomous robotic surgery and higher level task semiautomation but we are still some way off this and as Healthcare tends to lag behind other industries I suspect it will be ~2050 before we see significant progress in this area.
Either way the robots are coming. Are we ready?
Matt Stammers' Blog 