Y, ROBOT?

The word ‘robot’ most commonly creates the mental picture of a mechanical object full of wires and with a strange voice as seen in many science fiction films and novels.

But where did these robots come from? Why were they first produced? And for what purpose? These are the questions, with many others I will come across along the way, are what I aim to make clear to me and you.



The origin of the word robot is from an Old Church Slavonic word ‘robota’ meaning ‘servitude’ or ‘forced labour’. A word historically used to describe the way a tenant’s rent was paid for in forced labour.
The English language has only seen this word since Karel Čapek introduced it in his play Rossum’s Universal Robots (R.U.R)

R.U.R was the story of a factory producing robots to serve as cheap labour to the world. The robots are described as workers who “lack nothing but a soul.” In the story the robots realise their superiority to humans and declare war upon their creators.

A more popular adaptation of this story is 2004s blockbuster iRobot. The movie, starring Will Smith, takes many of the basic plots of Čapek’s R.U.R as well as the ‘Three Laws of Robotics’ which were first introduced by Isaac Asimov, a sci-fi author. In his 1942 short story ‘Runaround’ Asimov listed the Three Laws he had briefly mentioned in a few of his earlier stories.

These Three Laws were:
• A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm
• A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law
• A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law

These laws were meant to be the ultimate protection for humans from the robots. As we see in Čapek’s R.U.R, as well as Alex Proyas’ iRobot, there are flaws and robots do rebel.

But along the origin of robots I was interested in how advanced they had become and what they were capable of doing in real life rather than in science fiction films.

Asimo was named as the world’s most advanced robot when he opened the Edinburgh Science Festival in 2009 where he performed in front of more than 7500 people. Asimo has many human-like abilities including walking up stairs, dancing in time with music and playing football.

Asimo was developed by Honda and was built in such a way that would mean he could operate in the real world including in the home or the office. During the designing and building process Asimo’s dimensions were all made around enabling him to carry out everyday tasks such as picking things up and navigating his way around.

However, since then there have been many more robots on the scene. In 2011 Ecci, short for Eccerobot, was said to be the most human-like robot as it has muscles and tendons that help move his ‘bones’ that are made from a specially designed plastic. However the likeness of the robot to humans doesn’t finish there as it also has the same vision capacity as us through its one eye and has a computer built into his brain that enables him to analyse data to ensure he learns from his mistakes.

With robots becoming increasingly more ‘human’ let’s hope that the research can be used to help future research of artificial limbs and medical research as Rolf Pfeifer, director of the lab that created Ecci, hopes.

But I don’t think we need to worry about a robotic take-over too soon as there are still giant gaps in the research into creating a robotic ‘human’ brain.

Websites I used for research within this blog post are listed below:
• http://www.sciencefriday.com/segment/04/22/2011/science-diction-the-origin-of-the-word-robot.html
• http://capek.misto.cz/english/rur.html
• http://asimo.honda.com/Inside-ASIMO/
• http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2007740/Ecci-worlds-advanced-robot-muscles-tendons--ability-correct-mistakes.html
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wiw-jbjnyzc