Most intelligent robot control systems begin with the goal of creating a robot to carry out human-specified tasks. While these tasks vary in difficulty, they must, by their very nature, involve abstractconcepts. For example, typical tasks might be: go to a specific location, identify an object, or pickup an object. Attempting to directly achieve the goal of carrying out human commands createsbasic assumptions about the architectural design of a robot. We call this philosophy task-orienteddesign. We believe that a significant pitfall exists in both the top-down and bottom-up task-oriented robot design methodologies: inherent anthropomorphic bias. This bias refers to the design ofprespecified robot tasks: traditional research in the design of intelligent robots has attempted toget robots to do the tasks a human can, and to do them in a humanlike manner. Historically,