“Welfare robots” are supposed to help maintain the quality of elderly care in institutions, while a dramatic demographic shift will lead to a significant problem attracting a sufficient number of caregivers. We give a status on the state of the art of welfare robots with a focus on the technical challenges that will constrain the development of robots in the next two decades. From this it follows, that robots will be recognizable as machines in the near future. To stay in concrete grounds, we will describe three use cases that are currently addressed in a project in which we design robots that will be applied in elderly care centers. These serve as examples of the kind of welfare robots that could realistically built in the near future. In the last section, we discuss the role such robots could take and how they could change elderly care in the near future.