Overview

The term "robot" comes from a Czechoslovakian word for "work" used in the 1921 play by Karel Capek called R.U.R. ("Rossum's Universal Robots") to describe an army of manufactured industrial slaves. Since then, we have come to think of robots as the mechanical men or "androids" of modern science fiction. In reality, technical manuscripts from as early as 300-400 B.C. reveal that human beings have been trying to build automated machines or "automata" for centuries.

The development of modern robotics was precipitated by the advent of steam power and electricity during the Industrial Revolution. A growing market for consumer products drove engineers to devise ways of producing automatic machines to speed up production, do tasks that humans could not do, and to replace humans in dangerous situations. In 1893 Canadian professor George Moore produced "Steam Man...