Robotics

Robotics is the interdisciplinary field devoted to the design, construction, operation and use of robots: machines able to perceive their environment, process that information and act physically on the world. It brings together mechanical, electrical and electronic engineering with computer science and artificial intelligence.

The sense-plan-act loop

An autonomous robot is usually organized around a classic cycle, that of sense-plan-act: perceive the environment with sensors to build a model of the world, plan the best sequence of movements over that model, and act by executing it with the actuators. This paradigm was born in the late 1960s with pioneering robots such as Shakey, of the Stanford Research Institute, and works especially well in structured environments.

Robotics and artificial intelligence

It is worth not confusing the two disciplines. Robotics provides the physical body; artificial intelligence is one of the technologies that govern it, the one that gives it “intelligence”: computer vision to perceive, planning to decide, and reinforcement or imitation learning to learn to move. Not all robotics uses AI, nor is all AI robotics.

Where the words come from

The word “robot” was born in 1920 in the play R.U.R., by the Czech writer Karel Čapek—though it was his brother Josef who suggested it—and comes from the Czech robota, “forced labor.” The term “robotics” was coined by the writer Isaac Asimov, whose first recorded use dates from 1941; Asimov is also the author of the famous Three Laws of Robotics.

Where it is heading

Robotics today spans industrial arms, mobile and collaborative robots, drones and autonomous vehicles; the world's stock of industrial robots surpassed four and a half million units in 2024. The 2026 frontier is the arrival of foundation models in robotics—vision, language and action models that learn general control policies—with proposals such as Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics or NVIDIA's open GR00T N1 model, both from 2025, and a renewed push of humanoid robots.