Fascinating Facts About Robots That Will Surprise You

The robot from movies is almost always humanoid, but that's more of a cinematic cliché than a technical requirement. In essence, a robot is a device that gathers information about its surroundings, processes it according to a set program, and performs an action — without a human being involved at every step. The key feature is the ability to independently react to change: a sensor detects a signal, the program decides what to do, the mechanical part executes the command. Under this definition, a factory robotic arm without a single humanlike part qualifies as a robot, as do a robot vacuum and a Mars rover weighing about a ton. A remote-controlled toy car doesn't count as a robot — a person is executing the commands directly, and the car itself decides nothing.

Unimate began work in 1961 at the General Motors plant in Ewing Township, New Jersey. This heavy hydraulic arm, weighing over a ton, removed red-hot metal parts from a die-casting machine — work that was too hot and too dangerous for a human. GM paid $18,000 for the first Unimate, while Unimation's own development costs came to nearly $65,000 per unit.

In 1920, the Czech writer Karel Čapek finished his play R.U.R., about artificial workers created for heavy labor. The word "robot" for the play was suggested by his brother, the painter Josef Čapek — he took it from the Czech word "robota," meaning forced labor. Before the play premiered in 1921, no such term existed in engineering: the word crossed over from literature into engineering, and only over the following decades became firmly attached to real machines.

Researchers at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) are building soft robots from self-healing polymers. When such a robot is damaged, it closes the injury under the influence of light, heat, or plain air — much like a scratch heals on skin. This matters especially where a robot works in close contact with people: a rigid metal construction is simply unsafe in that setting, while a soft, self-healing material reduces the risk of injury and extends the mechanism's lifespan.

The Canadian robot hitchBOT couldn't walk — but it could stick out its thumb by the roadside and hold a conversation with drivers through a speech recognition system. Visually it looked whimsical: a body made from a plastic bucket, foam pool-noodle arms, garden gloves, and rubber boots. The robot successfully hitchhiked across Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands, recording the trip on a built-in camera. But during its journey through the United States, unknown vandals destroyed it in Philadelphia, and the experiment had to be cut short.

The humanoid robot Sophia from Hanson Robotics can recognize faces and emotions, hold a conversation, and mimic facial expressions. In 2017, she became the first robot to receive citizenship: Saudi Arabia issued her a passport at a conference in Riyadh — even though the country at that point still didn't grant citizenship to many foreign workers. Since then Sophia has attended conferences, given interviews, and spoken at the United Nations.

In 2018, German researchers tested how people react when a Nao robot asks not to be switched off. Of the 43 participants who heard the robot's plea, 13 refused to press the button. The rest took twice as long to switch it off compared to participants whose robot was silenced without any protest. The study explains this reaction by how the human brain perceives any device behaving like a living thing: even when people know they're facing an unconscious machine, they respond instinctively to its "request."

The Curiosity rover landed on Mars in 2012 and has been continuously exploring the planet's surface ever since: it has found traces of ancient lakes, analyzed the composition of soil and atmosphere. More than a decade has passed — and Curiosity is still working, though it was designed for a far shorter service life. The rover is controlled from Earth, but not in real time: the signal takes anywhere from four to more than twenty minutes to reach Mars depending on the two planets' positions. So Curiosity can make some decisions on its own — for example, driving around an obstacle it spotted after receiving its route from engineers.

Building a first mechanism and writing a first program for it explains how a robot works far more clearly than any list of facts. A child who has connected a sensor to a simple circuit themselves — and watched it respond to a command — remembers the principle far better than any description could teach. The basic logic of a robot — sensor, condition, action — is the same logic that underlies programming a character in a game: in both cases, you decide what should happen under certain conditions and write it out as a sequence of steps. At Rocket Tech School, children meet this logic hands-on: they program characters and mechanics in Minecraft and Roblox, then move on to languages like Python and tools like Unity — where the same principles of sensors, conditions, and loops work in their own projects, not someone else's ready-made game.