What the Heck is a
by David Calkins
In 1921, Karl Capek wrote the play Rossum’s Universal Robots, thus coining the term “Robot.”
(Okay, technically it was his brother Josef who amended Karl’s original term from either the
Latin labori, or the Czech trudnik, but we won’t quibble. It was still Karl’s play.)
In the play, they were not
electro-mechanical humans. They
were very much flesh and blood,
manufactured in fleshy parts and later
assembled. This very much follows the
golum and Frankenstein mythos. And
it is clearly the basis for follow-ups like
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
/ Blade Runner, BattleStar Galactica,
and to an extent, zombie mythos. Ah,
but language is ever so fluid, and the
original intended Corpus Novum in
the above tales has since been
replaced by “clone” in modern usage.
Yet we grandfather “robot” in on the
above stories. Yet under Capek’s
original definition, none of us can call
our creation a robot.
And now, we have so very many
different opinions on what a robot is.
Ask 10 roboticists for a definition, and
you’ll get 15 answers.
• It must move across the floor, some
• It must have some grabbing device.
• It must have artificial intelligence,
others will say.
• It must react to its environment or
• It must do the job of a man.
• It must run without human
• It must obey the three laws.
• It must have an x-y-z table with a
manipulator. etc., etc.
70 SERVO 06.2008
Now, if I use any one of the
definitions above (far removed from
Capek’s), I can come up with
something that fits the definition, but
clearly is not a robot. For example, car
welding bots are bolted to the floor.
They have no lateral motion. Yet they
are robots. But if I remote control
such an arm, some would say it’s not
a robot. At what point does a car
with cruise control become a robot —
when it can follow lines? When it
can take you to work? Why doesn’t
cruise control count as a robotic
attachment? ‘cause GM’s marketing
department chose not to call it that
back in the ‘70s?
“It must have a sensor and react
to an environment” — well, every
wall-thermostat has just that. And it’s
reprogrammable. Analog? Sure, but it
fits the definition. Everyone likes to
call the Mars rover a robot, yet people
at JPL drive it. Hell of a lag time on
those signals, but bundling packets of
driving-coordinate data doesn’t make
it autonomous. Many who call the
rovers “robots” sneer at combat
robots, yet they are fundamentally the
same in operation as the Mars rovers.
A Roomba is called a robot, but really,
it’s mostly just touch sensors doing
obstacle avoidance — how much
intelligence is that? And why isn’t a
dishwasher a robot if a Roomba is?
“It has moving parts inside and it’s
reprogrammable, but no wheels,”
you say. Just like those car-welding
robots without wheels that you do
call a robot.
If I put a WiFi controller on a
RoboNova, 99.9% of people will say,
“that’s a robot!” Mostly because it’s in
human form. Yet a lowly R/C car with
the same transmitter gets no such
respect. Even when those R/C cars
have sonar with ROV override.
And let’s look at Asimov/Kubric’s
HAL from 2001. No arms, no body.
But he gets the tag. Those damnable
bodyless web-crawlers qualify, but
hexapods don’t? Millions of lines of
code with not one motor, and both
HAL and Google’s web-crawler lucks
out for the title. C-3PO got into
CMU’s Robot Hall of Fame. I’m sure
actor Tony Daniels — the man in the
3PO suit — was quite proud of being
called a robot (although if the robot
tag was to be given to a Star Wars
actor, it clearly belonged to Hayden
For those few who’ve actually
read Asimov’s short stories (don’t lie),
in one story, “The Evitable Conflict,”
the robot has no body. Just a
machine. Some giant, pre-Internet
fantasy super-computer. Very clearly
defined in the book as a robot. So,
to Asimov at least, a body was not
necessary to gain the title — he used
the term for both moving platforms,