The origins of robot

The origins of robot go back to automatons, machines that imitate the figure and movements of an animated being, designed to manipulate objects and perform heavy operations that were previously reserved only for people.

This term was coined in 1920 by the Czech playwright Karel Čapek although it was actually his brother Joseph who suggested it. Karel Čapek and Josef created a famous play called R.U.R. (Rossum Universal Robots) and introduced the word robot in their work. The term robot in Slavic means work. The word robotics was coined by the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov who established his famous laws in 1942 in his novel Runaround.

Robots have been massively introduced on assembly lines but in recent years they have spread to jobs that require greater precision or cheap labour. They're also used in tasks that are too dirty or dangerous, in land and space exploration, in surgery, weapons, research, toxic waste removal, mining, or in the search and rescue of people. These machines are currently built with metals, plastics, cables and rigid components but in the future they'll be made of organic materials and may be as soft as gelatine.