(Source: flyver.co)

Robots have been a dream and source of fascination for humans ever since Asimov first wrote the three laws of robotics. Having an artificial being serving us has always seemed appealing to humanity and because of this we have striven for decades to turn it into a reality, but maybe somewhere along the way we made a mistake. Most all of our efforts have been concentrated on creating a humanoid robot that will serve humans. But why?

Let’s start with a little history. Robots were first introduced as a concept by the Czech science fiction writer Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R. in 1920. In the play he presented them as simplified artificial human beings which were used for labor.The origin of the word comes from the Slovak robota which literally means labor. After that, authors such as Isaac Asimov took the concept and developed it further into what we think of today as robots – human-like machines made of metal whose main purpose is to aid us in all sorts of tasks.

Expressions of this idea can be encountered throughout human art and science in the last century. They have simply become part of our culture, but in a very narrow definition of the word, as evident by the way it is expressed.

When you ask a person to define what a robot is, most will not think of the machine somewhere in a factory putting their car together or the computer program going around and indexing all the pages of the internet so you can find them later on Google, even though both of these fit the primary definition of a robot. They are artificial, automated, programmed objects whose sole purpose is to in some way replace humans in certain tasks.

Now, what most people would probably think of is probably some form of either R2 D2 or a humanoid weapon a la Terminator. Because the public perception is such, a humanoid robot is bound to be a success. Lots of time, money and research is going into the development of a humanoid robot to aid people in their daily life, but with the current state of technology in areas such as UAVs, we have to ask ourselves whether this is really the most practical format for a robot.

For the sake of this article we will take and explore the idea of a robot as a physical entity which aids humans and not all the other forms of automation, such as computer programs, which can also technically be categorised as robots.

The first and main thing such a machine should be able to do is interact with the physical world. It must be mobile and in some way capable of affecting other objects. If we go further into specifics, a robot should be capable of performing tasks which would normally have to be performed by humans and ideally it should be capable of handling orders. Seeing as how we interact with the world through our human body, it is natural for us to think that the most intuitive shape for a robot is the humanoid one. Hands are simply so good for grabbing things and legs are quite amazing at getting us to places, but in reality they may not actually be the most efficient method for a machine, since machines can be built into any shape or form. Moreover, the manual dexterity of a human hand and leg has proven quite difficult to replicate.

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