This is a question we get asked a lot so we thought we’d put people out oftheir misery. Firstly the word robot comes from the Czech word‘robotnik‘ which means forced labour or even slave. Watching movieslike I Robot, Wall-E and reading various sci-fi novels of the past you’llquickly see that robots have mostly always been portrayed as helpers andservents of humanity.

It’s only in recent years that the image of robots has been upgraded tosentient beings with minds of their own e.g. transformers and even IRobot.

Anyway the word was first introduced by playwright Karel Capek in his play‘RUR – Rossum’s Universal Robots‘ and it’s from there that the wordand idea became popular. The first robot to be developed was by JosephEngelberger and George Devol back in 1961 and if you’re imagining a metallicbeing with 2 arms, 2 legs and a head you can forget it. The first robot wasbasically a clawed arm that dropped hot steel car parts into water forcooling.

90% of robots today are used in factories, working on production lines andoften handling dangerous materials that humans would find difficult or evenimpossible to handle. Other uses include exploration such as deep seaexploration and mining.

ScienceFacts

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