robot
/ˈrəʊbɒt
/noun
1A machine capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically, especially one programmable by a computer: half of all American robots are making cars or trucks [as modifier]: a robot arm...
- Science and design also are brought together with interactive robots and large-scale computer graphics.
- Now that robots and computer simulations are replacing bench science, architects are giving researchers new laboratory environments that facilitate the exchange of ideas and bring together experts of many disciplines.
- Another robot grabs and places a wooden pallet, then lays down a cardboard slip sheet before stacking cases two at a time for a total of 40 on each pallet, which are then stretchwrapped.
1.1(Especially in science fiction) a machine resembling a human being and able to replicate certain human movements and functions automatically: the robot closed the door behind us...
- Thirty-one years from now, in 2035, there is one robot for every five human beings.
- We will see a time where humans and robots coexist without complicated interpersonal family issues or blind machine prejudice.
- As we discover near the film's conclusion, he has apparently developed an ability to create the robots based on pre-existing human forms.
1.2A person who behaves in a mechanical or unemotional manner: public servants are not expected to be mindless robots...
- People cannot do that unless they're living in a dictatorship and want to be dictated to behave like robots.
- The lead character changed physically, reinforcing his point that no matter what physical changes we can undergo we're all just genetically programmed robots here.
- Movies are not computers, and we're not robots, though the industry likes to think that.
2 another term for crawler (in the computing sense).Search engine robots are automated programs that traverse the web, indexing page content and following links....
- What's good for the visitor is often good for the search engine robots.
3South African A set of automatic traffic lights: waiting at a robot I caught the eye of a young woman
Origin
From Czech, from robota 'forced labour'. The term was coined in K. Čapek's play R.U.R. 'Rossum's Universal Robots' (1920).
This is one of the few English words to have come from Czech—from robota ‘forced labour’. The term was coined in Karel Čapek's play R.U.R., or Rossum's Universal Robots (1920), when it described an artificial man or woman.