Robots and Robotics

What this quiz asks

• The word 'robot' was first used in a stage play by which Czech writer?
• Is an 'android' a robot designed to look and act like a human being?
• Which company makes the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner?
• The da Vinci system, approved in the United States in 2000, is a robot used for what?
• Which science-fiction writer coined the word 'robotics' and set out the Three Laws of Robotics?
• The famous 18th-century chess automaton known as the Mechanical Turk really did choose its own moves.
• ASIMO, the robot that could walk, run and climb stairs on two legs, was built by which company?
• Spot, a yellow four-legged robot used to inspect building sites and power plants, is made by which company?
• What is a 'cobot'?
• Most jointed industrial robot arms have how many axes of movement?
• Select ALL of these that are sensors a robot can use to perceive its surroundings.
• Unimate, the first industrial robot on a production line, went to work in a factory belonging to which car maker?
• Leonardo da Vinci sketched designs for a mechanical knight in armour, worked by pulleys and cables, around 1495.
• Order these robot milestones from earliest to most recent.
• Shakey, built at the Stanford Research Institute in the late 1960s, is famous as the first what?
• Select ALL of these robots that are humanoids, built with a human-like body.
• In 1739 Jacques de Vaucanson amazed Paris with a mechanical creature that seemed to eat and digest grain. What was it?
• In what year was Karel Čapek's play R.U.R., which introduced the word 'robot', first performed?
• Which engineer described programmable automata, including a band of musicians on a boat, in his Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices of 1206?
• In robotics, what is the 'uncanny valley' described by Masahiro Mori in 1970?