For the sake of clarity, I have grouped assistive purposes into four categories of managing conditions: normal, disadvantaged, performance-critical, and infrastructural. Assistive robots have the potential to populate private, occupational and public spaces as well as the natural habitat and cyberspace. But the robotic agents I leave out here for the most part are the virtual agents such as the harvesters that trawl the Internet (e.g. the Google bots), or avatars who can also be classified as remote controlled robots.