A robot is a machine generally used in order to accomplish dangerous or hard and painful tasks for the men.

The first person who used this term is the Czechoslovakian writer Karel Capek in 1920. The term robotics was implemented by the American writer (with soviet roots) called Isaac Asimov 22 years later. He established the principle of the 3 laws of robotics, notably reused in the film I Robot :

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law

People tend to make a confusion between several types of robots : the cyborg which is actually an organism at a time natural and synthetic, the android which is a robot having a human appearance, and the automaton which is an apparel that has functions and is able to do some tasks on its own.

Among the most famous robots we can mention Terminator, Robocop, R2D2 or AIBO the robot-dog