The word Robot was first used by Karel Čapek, a Czech playwright, in 1920, to refer to a group of artificial human-like servants and workers in his play R.U.R. Čapek adapted the term robota, which in Czech means work but is also derived from Old Slavonic rabota = servitude.

Of all the words that refer to this type of machine (android, cyborg, automaton, droid, replicant) android is probably the oldest: it was first used in writing by St. Albertus Magnus as early as 1270. This prolific inventor did even build the first android (a robot which resembles a human) with the materials of his time: iron, leather and glass.

There is evidence that Mankind has tried to create programmable automatisms since the early beginnings of civilization. There were moving statues in the tombs of ancient Egyptian Pharaohs that could act automatically under certain circumstances.

Even the great genius Leonardo Da Vinci himself designed a robot in the 15th century; he probably called it an automaton. What Da Vinci wanted to produce was a war machine, a tireless warrior, but nobody knows if he ever built it. His creation was, together with many other war artifacts he designed, forgotten until 1950.

Nowadays, this concept of human-like behaviour has also adopted a new and intriguing focus: Artificial Intelligence. The use of machines to perform strenuous jobs and make life easier for humans has always been the subject of real science but also one of the main topics of Science Fiction; and the new approach of an intelligent mechanism that is capable not only of performing tasks, but also of making decisions, learning from experience, and perhaps of having emotions, opens a whole new world for investigation and for imagination and awe.

The following links will shed some light on this bewildering theme:
- Europeana (The European Encyclopaedia).
- Nasa (Robots for Space Exploration).
- MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
- Leonardo, a sociable robot.