The machines of the Innorobo conference...

Robots of every shape and size were on show at the recent Innorobo conference in France.

Nearly 10,000 people registered to attend the three-day summit, which examined the role that service robots will play in everyday life.

This photo shows the Embodied Cognition in a Compliantly Engineered robot, or ECCE robot, which has been designed to have a "truly human-like" upper body.

Researchers plan to use the robot to test hypotheses about human motion and compare the motion of the machine with that of people.

The robot is designed to mimic human behaviour at every level, from the way muscles work to control movement of the limbs and the way the human brain interacts with muscles.

ECCE is a cyclops - the single camera in the eyeball-like structure in its head has a 90-degree field of vision - but future versions will have binocular vision. Future versions of the robot will also be able to reproduce human movement more accurately.