The chances of having an obedient robot to do unwelcome or dangerous jobs have increased tremendously, with orders for industrial robots rising to a record 18 per cent in the first half of 2009. In homes about 4 million autonomous vacuum cleaners and lawn-mowers are already in operation. Right now Japan uses about 320 robots of all sorts per 10,000 employees, while Germany uses 148 industrial robots per 10,000 employees. In the car industry alone, there is one robot per 10 workers in Japan, Italy and Germany.