Humanity has been and still is attracted to the concept of an artificial being that would make life easier and more enjoyable. The word Robot was introduced in 1921 by check-writing Karel Capek in his play "RUR" (Rossuum's Universal Robots), which originally meant compulsory labor. Then, in 1927, Fritz Lang, in his film Metropolis, was the first to project a robot in the modern sense of the term. Today's general understanding of robots, according to the Robot Institute of America in 1979, a robot is seen as "a reprogrammable, multifunctional manipulator designed to move materials, parts, tools, or specialized devices through various movements programmed to perform a variety of tasks." In simple terms, according to the Encyclopædia Britannica, a robot is any automatically controlled machine that replaces human effort, even if it does not resemble human beings in appearance nor performs functions in a human-like manner. Furthermore, to meet the objective of this article, a proper definition is necessary from the textbook we are currently using, Artificial Intelligence, a Modern Approach, defines a. robot as an active artificial agent whose environment is the physical world. The active part excludes rocks, the artificial part excludes animals and the physical part excludes pure software agents. In this article, I will discuss the main tasks that robots can perform and mainly what robots are made of. Generally speaking, it seems like to make an autonomous robot from scratch, you don't need too many things. It would take a generic planning agent (or it could also be a decision making agent), equip it with wheels and a camera (any visual scanning device and mechanical legs) and c That's basically it. But there is another...... middle of paper ...... Artificial intelligence, a modern approach. Structured light sensors can be used to obtain 3D vision, that is, to build visual sensors that report reality. position in three-dimensional space of points on the surface of one or more observed bodies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_rangefinder http://www.cognisys-inc.com/HowTo/xbs.php Isom, James . “Robotics Laboratory”. March 26, 2010IMDb Inc., “The Internet Movie Database.” The Internet Movie Database. March 26, 2010. "Robotics Research Group". University of Texas at Austin. March 26, 2010. http://www.britannica.com/"Robot". Encyclopedia Britannica. 2010. Encyclopædia Britannica online. March 26. 2010 .