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. They ra

Buckley, Ruth V. "Robot." Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc. 1993.

The nation that has used this new field most successfully, however, is Japan. It has done so by making robot manipulators without trying to duplicate all of the motions of which the human arm and hand are capable. The robots are also easily reprogrammed and this makes them more adaptable to changing tasks on an assembly line. The majority of the industrial robots in use in the world today are found in Japan.

None of these robots look like the androids of fiction. Although it would be possible to construct a robot that was humanlike, true androids are still only a distant possibility. For example, even the apparently simple act of walking on two legs is very hard for computer-controlled mechanical systems to duplicate. In fact, the most stable walker made, is a six-legged system. A true android would also have to house or be linked to the computer-equivalent of a human brain. Despite some claims made for the future development of artificial intelligence, computers are likely to remain calculating machines without the ability to think or create for a long time.

Except for firms that were designed from the start around robots, such as several of those in Japan, industrial robots are still only slowly being placed in production lines. Most of the robots in large automobile and airplane factories are used for welding, spray-painting, and other operations where humans would require expensive ventilating systems. The problem of workers being replaced by industrial robots is only part of the issue of automation as a whole, and individual robots on an assembly line are often regarded by workers in the familiar way that they think of their car.

Robots are also used in many ways in scientific research, particularly in the handling of radioactive or other

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