The word robot comes from the Czech writer Karel Capek's 1921 play ?R.U.R.? (which stands for "Rossum's Universal Robots"), in which mechanical beings made to be slaves for humanity rebel and kill their creators. From this, the fictional image of robots is sometimes troubling, expressing the fears that people may have of a robotized world over which they cannot keep control. The history of real robots is rarely as dramatic, but where developments in robotics may lead is beyond our imagination.

Robots exist today. They are used in a relatively small number of factories located in highly industrialized countries such as the United States, Germany, and Japan. Robots are also being used for scientific research, in military programs, and as educational tools, and they are being developed to aid people who have lost the use of their limbs. These devices, however, are for the most part quite different from the androids, or humanlike robots, and other robots of fiction.

Although the term robot did not come into use until the 20th century, the idea of mechanical beings is much older. Ancient myths and tales talked about walking statues and other marvels in human and animal form. Such objects were products of the imagination and nothing more, but some of the mechanized figures also mentioned in early writings could well have been made. Such figures, called automatons, have long been popular.

Robots are also used in many ways in scientific research, particularly in the handling of radioactive or other hazardous materials. Many other highly automated systems are also often considered as robots. These include the probes that have landed on and tested the soils of the moon, Venus, and Mars, and the pilotless planes and guided missiles of the military.

Research into developing mobile, autonomous robots is of great value. It advances robotics, aids the comparative study of mechanical and biological systems, and can be used for such purposes as devising robot aids for the handicapped.

The most important 20th-century development, for automation and for robots in particular, was the invention of the computer. When the transistor made tiny computers possible, they could be put in individual machine tools. Modern industrial robots arose from this linking of computer with machine. By means of a computer, a correctly designed machine tool can be programmed to perform more than one kind of task. If it is given a complex manipulator arm, its abilities can be enormously increased. The first such robot was designed by Victor Scheinman, a researcher at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. It was followed in the mid-1970s by the production of so called programmable universal manipulators for assembly (PUMAs) by

Some topics in this essay:
PUMAs Motors, Japan Robots, Industrial Revolution, Venus Mars, Pierre Jacquet-Droz, Universal Robots, Isaac Asimov, , Cambridge Mass, Karel Capek's, industrial robots, assembly line, robots scientific research, artificial intelligence, clockwork figures, automated systems, robots robots, robots scientific, conflict law, scientific research, machine tools,