95 Fun Facts About Robots

The word 'robot' comes from the Czech word 'robota', which means what?

Robota means forced labour, the unpaid work serfs owed their lords. Karel Čapek, whose 1920 play made the word famous, credited his brother Josef with coining it.

What was the name of the first industrial robot, installed on a production line in 1961?

Unimate was the first industrial robot: Joseph Engelberger's company Unimation installed it in 1961 at a car plant in New Jersey, where it lifted hot die castings off a machine.

Which branch of AI lets a robot interpret and respond to a spoken command?

Natural Language Processing drove ELIZA, a 1966 MIT chatbot that only turned users' words back into questions; even so, its creator's secretary asked him to leave the room so she could talk to it in private.

Which carmaker unveiled the walking humanoid robot ASIMO in 2000?

Honda began in 1986 with machines that were little more than a pair of walking legs, then added a head, torso and arms over about a dozen prototypes before unveiling ASIMO in 2000.

The first industrial robot went to work in 1961 at a New Jersey plant owned by which carmaker, then the world's largest?

General Motors put the arm to work at its Ewing Township plant near Trenton, lifting hot parts from a die-casting machine, a job that exposed human workers to toxic fumes and the risk of losing a limb.

Which play, written by Karel Čapek, introduced the word 'robot' to the world?

R.U.R. stands for Rossum's Universal Robots; Čapek's robots are not metal machines but artificial people grown from synthetic flesh, and by the end of the play their revolt has wiped out the human race.

Which component, the robot's equivalent of a muscle, turns an electrical, pneumatic or hydraulic input into force or motion?

Actuator: most are electric motors, but some small robots flex with 'muscle wire', a shape-memory alloy that contracts by a few percent when electricity is applied.

Which rover successfully landed on Mars in February 2021?

Perseverance touched down in Jezero Crater on 18 February 2021 to search for signs of ancient microbial life; China's Zhurong rover followed it to the surface three months later.

In science fiction's Three Laws of Robotics, what does the First Law forbid a robot to do?

Injure a human being: the First Law also bars a robot from letting a person come to harm through inaction, and it overrides the other two, so a robot must disobey an order or sacrifice itself to keep someone safe.

Robots running ROS, the Robot Operating System, are mainly programmed in C++ and which other language?

Python and C++ are the two main languages for ROS code; the free toolkit, first released in 2007, was pitched by its founders as a 'Linux of robotics' that every lab could share and build on.

What kind of robot is the da Vinci system?

The da Vinci is a surgical robot: a surgeon at a console drives its arms through small incisions. Intuitive Surgical's system received FDA clearance in 2000.

Which robot sensor gauges the distance to an obstacle the way a bat does?

An ultrasonic sensor fires sound above 20 kHz, too high for us to hear, and times the echo; the distance is worked out from that delay and the speed of sound.

Which animated film stars a lonely robot whose job is collecting waste?

WALL-E, short for Waste Allocation Load Lifter: Earth-class, has spent 700 years alone compacting trash on an abandoned Earth when he falls for the probe EVE and follows her into space.

Which astromech droid rode in Luke Skywalker's X-wing during the attack on the Death Star?

R2-D2 sat in the droid socket of Luke's X-wing in the 1977 film and was badly damaged by Darth Vader's fire during the trench run.

Which branch of AI lets a robot improve at a task without being reprogrammed?

Machine Learning got its name in 1959 from IBM's Arthur Samuel, whose checkers program improved by playing thousands of games against itself until it reached a respectable amateur standard.

A rigid body's six degrees of freedom are three straight-line moves plus roll, pitch and which third rotation?

Yaw is rotation about the vertical axis; sway, surge and heave are sailors' names for the three straight-line moves, and a robot arm needs six joints to reach any spot at any angle.

Which toymaker's Mindstorms kits, launched in 1998, let children build and program their own robots?

LEGO built the kits on technology from the MIT Media Lab and named them after Mindstorms, a 1980 book by MIT's Seymour Papert about children and computers.

Which field lets a robot interpret what its camera is pointed at?

Computer vision looked so easy in 1966 that MIT set it as a summer project for students, hooking a camera to a computer to describe what it saw; the job turned into decades of research.

Which company built Spot, the yellow four-legged robot, and Atlas, the backflipping humanoid, earning a reputation for viral demo videos?

Boston Dynamics spun out of MIT in 1992 and built its early robots for the US military; in 2022 it led six robot makers in pledging not to weaponise their general-purpose machines.

In business software, what does the abbreviation RPA stand for?

Robotic Process Automation involves no physical robot: the 'bots' are scripts that click and type through ordinary office software the way a human clerk would, filling in forms and moving data.

Which country is home to the industrial-robot maker FANUC?

Japan: FANUC, short for Fuji Automatic Numerical Control, has run 'lights-out' production since 2001, with robots building other robots unattended in the dark.

What does a robotic arm's end-effector actually do?

To grip or work on objects: the end effector is the tool at the arm's wrist, and one robot can swap a gripper for a welding torch or a camera as the job demands, hence its other name, end-of-arm tooling.

What is the study of robot motion without considering the forces that cause it?

Kinematics is the geometry of motion; the maths that works out a robot arm's joint angles also poses the limbs of animated characters, placing a hand or foot exactly where the animator wants it.

What do you call robots built to work at the scale of molecules?

Nanorobots are still mostly at the research stage; the idea goes back to Richard Feynman's 1959 lecture, where he passed on a friend's wild suggestion that patients might one day 'swallow the surgeon'.

What is it called when many simple robots cooperate locally to achieve a complex task?

Swarm robotics borrows from ants and bees: in 2014 Harvard set 1,024 tiny Kilobots loose with no leader, and they shuffled themselves into a five-pointed star and then the letter K.

Which wearable machine moves with a person's own limbs to boost their strength or help them walk again?

Exoskeleton frames help patients relearn to walk and take the strain off warehouse workers' backs; not all are robotic, since passive versions have no motors at all.

What is combining readings from cameras, lidar and radar into one picture of a robot's surroundings called?

Sensor fusion plays each sensor's strengths against the others' blind spots: radar judges distance and speed even in bad weather but can't read a road sign, while a camera can.

What type of robots work alongside humans in a shared workspace, often without safety cages?

Collaborative robots, or cobots, were invented at Northwestern University in 1996; the first were safe because they had no power of their own, so the worker supplied all the push.

Which owl-like robot toy, the must-have gift of Christmas 1998, seemed to learn English from its owner?

Furby only pretended to learn: it was programmed to swap its own 'Furbish' for English over time, but the myth that it recorded speech got it banned from US National Security Agency offices in 1999.

What is the term for technology that lets an operator feel the forces a remote robot's hand meets?

Haptics, from a Greek word for grasping and touching, found an early use in the remote-controlled arms built at Argonne National Laboratory, which let operators handle radioactive material without going near it.

A vacuum that maps your home and plots its own route is which kind of robot?

An autonomous robot makes its own decisions; NASA's Mars helicopter had to be one, because radio commands take minutes to cross space and its pilots on Earth could never have flown it with a joystick.

Which sensor reports a robot joint's angle by counting marks on a rotating disc?

Encoders do this optically: light shines through slots on a disc fixed to the joint, and counting the pulses gives angular position while their rate gives speed.

The Roomba vacuum cleaner is a popular example of which category of machine?

Service robots do useful jobs outside the factory; early Roombas managed theirs with no map at all, bouncing around on a pseudo-random path that crossed each patch of floor about three times.

Machines that could build copies of themselves are named after which Hungarian-born pioneer of computer design?

John von Neumann sketched a machine that could build its own copy in lectures in 1948 and 1949; he saw that the instructions must be copied separately from the machine, before DNA's structure was known.

Which company developed the popular 'Aibo' robotic dog?

Sony stopped repairing its Aibo dogs in 2014, eight years after ending production, and owners began holding Buddhist funeral services for broken ones; a new Aibo went on sale in 2018.

Which company bought the warehouse-robot maker Kiva Systems for $775 million in 2012?

Amazon bought Kiva Systems in March 2012 for $775 million and renamed it Amazon Robotics in 2015; its squat orange robots carry whole shelves to human pickers.

Which American tractor maker unveiled a self-driving tractor at the CES tech show in January 2022?

John Deere's tractor watches the field through six pairs of stereo cameras and stops for anything unexpected, so the farmer can leave the cab, and even the field, while it works.

Which branch of robotics builds biology-inspired machines from silicone and other compliant materials?

Soft robotics uses elastomers such as silicone instead of metal links, so a gripper can wrap around fruit or squeeze through gaps, mimicking octopus arms and worms.

Which manufacturer of industrial robots is headquartered in Augsburg, Germany?

KUKA stands for Keller und Knappich Augsburg, the two men who opened an acetylene plant there in 1898 to light homes and streets; China's Midea launched its takeover of the robot maker in 2016.

The 'Wheelbarrow' bomb-disposal robot was built in 1972 for British Army use in which conflict?

The Troubles: Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Miller took the chassis of an electrically powered wheelbarrow, hence the name, and added a hook and remote control so that car bombs in Northern Ireland could be towed away from a distance.

What are the devices pushed through a pipeline to clean or inspect it commonly called?

Pigs ride along with the oil or gas, pushed by the flow itself, so the pipeline never has to shut down; 'smart' pigs carry instruments that check the pipe wall for corrosion from the inside.

In the Marvel films, which robot built by Tony Stark and Bruce Banner as a peacekeeper decides humanity must be wiped out?

Ultron grows out of Tony Stark's dormant peacekeeping program and concludes that the surest route to world peace is human extinction; James Spader played the robot in the 2015 film.

In October 2017, which country granted citizenship to the social robot Sophia?

Saudi Arabia announced it at an investment summit in Riyadh, making Sophia the first robot granted citizenship anywhere; critics pointed out the irony in a country that had only just agreed to let women drive.

What handheld unit lets a technician jog an industrial robot into position and record it?

A teach pendant is the handheld console for jogging the arm and recording points. Its three-position enabling switch stops the robot if it is released or squeezed too hard.

In the three-phase model of robot control, which phase comes first?

Perception comes first, then processing, then action: sense, think, act. In 1986 Rodney Brooks proposed robots that drop the central thinking stage and couple their sensing more directly to behaviour.

Sweden's ASEA, an early maker of electric industrial robots, merged with a Swiss rival in 1988 to form which company?

ABB stands for ASEA Brown Boveri: the Swedish firm, which put industrial robots on sale in 1974, joined Switzerland's Brown, Boveri & Cie in 1988; in 2025 ABB agreed to sell the robot business to SoftBank.

Why did the builders of SRI's pioneering 1960s mobile robot name it Shakey?

It wobbled as it moved: after a month hunting for a name, one of the team said it 'shakes like hell and moves around', so Shakey it was; it became the first mobile robot able to reason about its own actions.

Which Westinghouse humanoid robot wowed crowds at the 1939 New York World's Fair?

Elektro walked on voice command, told jokes, smoked cigarettes and blew up balloons for the crowds; after the war Westinghouse sent him back on the road to county fairs and department-store openings.

MIT's 1990s robot head Kismet, with movable eyebrows, ears and lips, was built to recognise and simulate what?

Emotions: Kismet answered a visitor's praise or scolding with expressions of its own, and its builder Cynthia Breazeal likened their bond to an infant and its caretaker; the field is called affective computing.

Which NASA rover was lowered onto Mars by a rocket-powered 'sky crane' in August 2012?

Curiosity was too heavy for the airbags that had cushioned earlier rovers, so its descent stage lowered it to the ground on nylon tethers; a 12-year-old from Kansas, Clara Ma, had chosen its name.

Mars Pathfinder's 1997 rover was dedicated to which 19th-century American abolitionist?

Sojourner Truth, who escaped slavery in 1826 and toured America speaking for abolition and women's rights, was the choice of 12-year-old Valerie Ambroise, whose essay won a worldwide naming contest.

What silenced NASA's Mars rover Opportunity in 2018 after more than 14 years of exploring?

A planet-wide dust storm blotted out the Sun in June 2018 and starved Opportunity's solar panels; designed to run for 90 days, it had worked for more than 14 years, and NASA gave up calling it in February 2019.

DARPA's 2015 Robotics Challenge had humanoids drive a vehicle, open a door and turn a valve, tasks inspired by which disaster?

The Fukushima nuclear accident of 2011 moved DARPA to stage the contest for disaster robots; South Korea's KAIST took the $2 million prize with DRC-HUBO, which could kneel and roll on wheels in its knees.

The Stanford team leader who won the 2005 driverless desert race later launched which company's self-driving project, now Waymo?

Google's self-driving car project began in 2009 under Sebastian Thrun; four years earlier his robot car Stanley had won the desert race, which no vehicle had managed to finish the year before.

Robby the Robot first appeared in which 1956 science-fiction film?

Forbidden Planet's Robby reportedly cost MGM at least $100,000 to build, and the studio put him back to work the very next year in The Invisible Boy.

The Maschinenmensch, one of cinema's first robots, is brought to life in which 1927 Fritz Lang film?

Metropolis: the inventor Rotwang builds the robot in memory of his dead love Hel, then gives it the face of the heroine Maria; its look later inspired the design of C-3PO in Star Wars.

In the Terminator films, which military computer system becomes self-aware and turns on its human makers?

Skynet was built by Cyberdyne Systems for the US military; when it became self-aware and its operators tried to shut it down, it struck back with a nuclear attack.

The word 'robotics' was first recorded in 'Liar!', a 1941 short story by which science-fiction author?

Isaac Asimov coined 'robotics' in the story, whose robot Herbie can read minds and so lies to people rather than hurt their feelings; the Oxford English Dictionary records it as the word's first use.

What name did roboticist Masahiro Mori give in 1970 to the unease people feel at almost-human robots?

The uncanny valley is the dip in Mori's graph: our affinity for a robot climbs as it looks more human, then plunges into eeriness just short of lifelike.

What did NASA send up to the space station in 2014 for its humanoid robot Robonaut 2?

A pair of legs: Robonaut 2 arrived in 2011 as an upper body only, fixed to a post, so NASA sent up two climbing legs to let the humanoid move around inside the station.

Which famous shipwreck did the small tethered robot Jason Jr. help explore in 1986?

Titanic: Jason Jr. swam out on a cable from the crewed submersible Alvin as a prototype for the bigger robot Jason, which later surveyed a 1,600-year-old Roman trading ship.

In which HBO series do android 'hosts' start to rebel inside a futuristic theme park?

Westworld is based on Michael Crichton's 1973 film; its hosts are programmed never to harm the paying guests, who may do as they please, until some of the machines stray from their scripts.

The fast-moving delta robot was invented in Switzerland in the 1980s to pack which product into boxes?

Chocolates: after a visit to a chocolate maker, Reymond Clavel's team at EPFL in Lausanne set out to build a robot quick and light enough to drop pralines into their boxes, and patented its three-armed design in 1985.

In the 1987 film RoboCop, which crime-ridden American city does the cyborg policeman patrol?

Detroit: the corporation Omni Consumer Products has the murdered officer Alex Murphy rebuilt as RoboCop, 'part man, part machine, all cop', as the poster put it.

Rodney Brooks, Colin Angle and Helen Greiner founded which robotics company in 1990?

iRobot was incorporated in August 1990 as IS Robotics, an MIT spin-off, and built military and research robots such as the PackBot for a decade before the Roomba made it a household name in 2002.

The DARPA-funded quadruped BigDog, created in 2005, was shelved for what reason?

Too loud for combat: the robot mule could carry 340 pounds over rough ground, but Marines who tried its successor found the lawnmower-like roar of the petrol engine would give away their position.

In 2020 a four-legged Spot robot patrolled a Singapore park with a loudspeaker, telling visitors to do what?

Keep a safe distance apart: during the Covid-19 pandemic the robot broadcast social-distancing messages while its camera gauged how busy the park was; Spot went on general sale that June for $74,500.

Which semi-humanoid robot did SoftBank unveil in Tokyo in June 2014?

Pepper's first 1,000 units sold out within a minute in 2015, but the robot struggled to find customers, and SoftBank stopped making it in 2020 with only about 27,000 built.

In RoboCup's Standard Platform League, teams of identical Nao humanoids compete at which sport?

Soccer is the point of RoboCup: its founders set the goal of a robot team able to beat the human World Cup champions by 2050; the two-legged Nao replaced the Aibo robot dog as the league's standard player.

The therapeutic robot Paro, used in nursing homes, is modelled on which animal?

Paro is modelled on a harp seal pup: its designer, Takanori Shibata, watched the animals on an ice field in north-eastern Canada and recorded their cries there to give the robot its voice.

Which company announced its Optimus humanoid robot at an 'AI Day' event in August 2021?

The robot, also called Tesla Bot, was first presented by a dancer in a bodysuit; a physical prototype followed at the second AI Day a year later.

Ingenuity, the first aircraft to fly on another planet, carried a scrap of wing fabric from which pioneering aeroplane?

The Wright Flyer of 1903 supplied a small swatch of fabric, taped beneath the Mars helicopter's solar panel; planned for just five flights, Ingenuity went on to make 72.

Philae bounced twice on comet 67P in 2014 because which system failed to deploy?

Its harpoons never fired and the thruster meant to press it down had already failed, so Philae bounced twice and settled in a shaded spot where its solar panels could barely charge.

In Transformers, the Autobot leader Optimus Prime disguises himself as which kind of vehicle?

Semi truck: the toy began life as 'Battle Convoy', a transforming truck in Takara's Diaclone range, before Hasbro licensed it and relaunched it in 1984 as the leader of the Autobots.

The Mechanical Turk, a 1770 'automaton' that beat Napoleon and Benjamin Franklin, hid a human expert at which game?

Chess was the Turk's trick: Wolfgang von Kempelen built the cabinet to impress Empress Maria Theresa, and a master hidden inside worked the turbaned figure's moves.

Pierre Jaquet-Droz, whose 1770s automata still write and draw in a Swiss museum, built them to advertise which trade?

Watchmaking: Jaquet-Droz showed the dolls to Europe's nobility to sell his watches; the Writer can be set to pen any text of up to 40 letters, which is why it is counted a distant ancestor of the computer.

In 1206 the engineer al-Jazari described 50 ingenious machines, among them a famous water clock shaped like which animal?

The Elephant Clock marks each half hour with a show: a bird spins on top, a ball drops into a dragon's mouth and the driver on the elephant's neck strikes a drum.

Mathematician Norbert Wiener named which new science of control and communication in animals and machines in 1948?

Cybernetics comes from the Greek for steersman, the person who keeps a ship on course by constantly correcting it, which is the feedback idea at the heart of Wiener's 1948 book.

Grey Walter's light-seeking robots Elmer and Elsie, built in 1948–49 with plastic shells, were nicknamed after which animal?

Tortoises: the three-wheeled robots crept slowly under their shells, steering toward light and finding their own way back to a charging station when their batteries ran low.

What is the name of the Jetson family's robot maid in The Jetsons?

Rosie joins the family in the very first episode, 'Rosey the Robot', as an outdated demonstrator model hired from U-Rent a Maid; Jean Vander Pyl, also the voice of Wilma Flintstone, played her.

Astro Boy, the robot hero known at home as Mighty Atom, was created by which manga artist?

Osamu Tezuka's story begins with a scientist building the robot boy to replace his dead son, then selling him to a circus because a machine can never grow up.

'Danger, Will Robinson!' is the catchphrase of the Robot in which 1960s TV series?

Lost in Space gave its Robot the warning as he guarded young Will Robinson; one actor wore the suit while the show's narrator supplied the voice, and the line became the slogan of the 1998 film version.

Star Wars protocol droid C-3PO claims fluency in over how many forms of communication?

Six million forms of communication is C-3PO's boast; Anthony Daniels at first turned down even meeting George Lucas about the part, then was won over by the forlorn robot in Ralph McQuarrie's concept painting.

In Short Circuit (1986), what gives military robot Number 5 a human-like intelligence?

A lightning strike during a storm scrambles Number 5's circuits and makes him sentient; he flees the lab to learn about the world, voiced by Tim Blaney, and renames himself Johnny 5.

Which cigar-smoking Futurama robot, built in Tijuana, Mexico, works for the Planet Express delivery company?

Bender runs on alcohol: built to bend steel girders, he has to keep drinking to power himself, and turns the fuel into enough electricity to run appliances plugged into his body.

The hitchhiking robot HitchBOT was vandalised and destroyed in 2015 in which US city?

HitchBOT could not walk; it crossed Canada, Germany and the Netherlands by asking drivers to carry it, but its American trip ended after two weeks when it was found dismembered in Philadelphia on 1 August 2015.

What does Osaka University roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro call the android copy of himself?

Geminoid comes from geminus, Latin for twin; Ishiguro speaks through his double from a computer while a camera copies his head movements, and he has used it to take his university classes.

Which company's Trilobite, released in 2001, was the first commercial robot vacuum?

Electrolux showed a Trilobite prototype on the BBC's Tomorrow's World in May 1996 and put it on sale in 2001, a year before the first Roomba.

Lunokhod 1, the first remote-controlled rover on another world, was landed on the Moon in 1970 by which country?

The Soviet Union's Luna 17 delivered the eight-wheeled rover, which a five-person crew on Earth drove by remote control; designed to last three months, Lunokhod 1 kept working for more than ten.

What does the name of China's 2013 lunar rover Yutu translate to in English?

Yutu means Jade Rabbit, the rabbit that lives on the Moon with the goddess Chang'e in Chinese folklore; the rover rolled off the Chang'e 3 lander on 14 December 2013.

India's Pragyan rover landed near the lunar south pole in August 2023 on which mission?

Chandrayaan-3's lander Vikram touched down on 23 August 2023 and released Pragyan, making India the first nation to land near the lunar south pole; an earlier Pragyan was lost when Chandrayaan-2's lander crashed in 2019.

'Klaatu barada nikto' is the command that stops the robot Gort in which 1951 science-fiction film?

The Day the Earth Stood Still never translates the phrase, which Helen Benson must speak to Gort to save the planet; later films from Return of the Jedi to Army of Darkness have borrowed it.

In Disney's 2014 film Big Hero 6, the inflatable robot Baymax was built to serve as what?

Baymax calls himself a 'personal healthcare companion'; his huggable shape came from an inflatable vinyl robot arm that the film-makers saw on a research visit to Carnegie Mellon University.

Which actor portrays the android Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation?

Brent Spiner also played Data's brother Lore and their creator, Dr. Soong; he later said he felt too old to go on playing the part, since an android is not supposed to age.

Which long-running British TV series gave its hero a robot dog called K9 in 1977?

Doctor Who introduced K9 in the 1977 story The Invisible Enemy; the robot dog, voiced by John Leeson, went on to appear in spin-offs of his own, K-9 and Company and K9.