Why do robots look like humans?

Many robots are designed with a face – like Hitchbot or Pepper robot – yet don’t use their ‘eyes’ to see, or speak through their ‘mouth’. Given that some of the more realistic humanoid robots, like Sophia, are widely considered to be unnerving, and that humans have a propensity to anthropomorphise such designs in technology, should robots have faces at all – or do these faces provide other important functions? And what should they actually look like anyway? Richard Sprenger explains