How can robot research inspire applications for people’s everyday lives and habits? Perhaps our future butlers will not look like humanoids, but rather be like tiny insects that cooperate in large numbers to perform complex tasks? Today, entertainment robots are given characteristics that make them suitable as pets or to provide comfort. Domestic robots are designed to help with housekeeping such as vacuum cleaning or lawn mowing, and professional service robots to support security and health care. Robots in more basic research are not explicitly designed to serve humans in social settings. Still, many of these robots have appealing human-robot and robot-robot interaction properties (e.g. emergence of behaviours, self-assembly, and sensing and communication abilities). These characteristics can inspire entirely novel robot applications for domestic as well as other everyday settings, such as a schools and workspaces.