Stefano Stramigioli loves clever machines.

He's spent his career trying to make them even more clever.

Originally from Bologna in Italy, he now works in the Netherlands where part of his job is to guide the next generation of roboticists.

Professor Stramigioli predicts a golden age of robotics is just around the corner - in which machines will deliver your mail, do your gardening, drive your car and even perform surgery.

They'll be everywhere, he says, even inside underground pipes, inspecting for leaks.

Euronews met Professor Stramigioli at the University of Twente where he and his Segway transporter are a familiar, if startling, sight around the campus.

"You have said that robotics in the 21st century will be as pivotal as the PC was to the last century, expand on that."

"Imagine that you can put legs on a PC, you can put vision on a PC. You don't have cameras any more that just transmit the information, you can actually process the information and move the system on the basis of the information so you can make machines which are in some sense - of course we could have a discussion about intelligence - they react to their environment. And that's something that has an enormous number of applications.

"I think it's true to say that the PC, internet technology, has changed society in a very short period of time, do you think robotics will be as influential?"

"There is no doubt about it. It's now steadily growing and I think in one generation from now there will be big, big changes. In many shops now you can buy robot vacuum cleaners that clean the house. These are the first applications. This market will grow exponentially in the coming years. I do believe that in the future you will certainly have robots in the house that can stay at home and keep an eye on the house and do some tasks like cleaning up the house or keep and eye on the kids."

"Robot postmen?"

"That's a good point."

"Robot delivery men."

"Absolutely. That is certainly something that is coming, there's no doubt about it. Why? Because the technology will allow that. You can sort the mail and the mail will be collected by robots. You will have autonomous vehicles in the future that can drive around safely in the streets. That's not very close because there are legislation issues that will play an important role in this stuff. But then you will have robots that get out of these vehicles, go to the mail box and deliver the mail. Why not?"

"We're in a time of energy crisis - we need to find new sources of energy, but we also need to conserve what we've got. Are robotics going to help us in this area?"

"Well, it's certainly going to support actions. But of course the major decisions and prevention of disasters, if we go on like this, have to come from humans. Robots can certainly help. They are already employed in many applications like unmanned aerial vehicles, UAV's, for monitoring and to see where actually we have problems, what is the status of polluting agents and so on and so forth. We can work on machines with batteries using little energy, but of course the robot will use energy. But if you make machines which use little energy that will certainly help.

Talking to you as a scientist rather than as a roboticist, we are facing a big crisis at the moment. There's dwindling fuel supplies, the planet is warming, some people say disastrously, what would you say would be the solution to some of these problems.

I do believe that we are really risking a lot. There should be legislations which strongly prevent and act on the future. A simple example would be that it would be forbidden to drive cars that use more than is strictly necessary to move around, and that is not done. Why is it not done, because politicians would then lose votes. It's as simple as that. So before doing that stuff public opinion should be changed. It is recognised by scientists that if we do not act now - and really we are already too late - we will not stop this process in such a way that we will prevent disasters.So disasters are going to come, I do believe in the doomsday scenario.

And yet, here you are, working on devices in a field that will bear fruit, if you like, in 20, 30 , 40 years time. You wouldn't be doing that unless you had a measure of optimism.

Well I am optimistic. I think that robotics is a wonderful field and not just because it is the field I am working on. I am working in this field because I believe in what it can give our society. People should be open minded about this technology because it can only bring positive developments, for houses, for healthcare, for security and for other applications in our society.