The word robot comes from the ancient Czech. Entered in the every day lexicon, the word robot comes from “robota”, hard work. It has been used for the first time by the Czech writer Karl ÄŒapek (1880-1938) in his work R.U.R (Rossumovi univerzální roboti) to indicate “constructed” beings by artificially reproducing and assembling different parts of the body. In his novel ÄŒapek imagined a world based on the work of human robots. The only thing that they don’t have is soul. These human robots slowly rebel themselves and eventually prevail over humans. In the end, however, even robots discover love and feelings.

Another scientist, Isaac Asimov, a Russian naturalized American (1920-1992) wrote on robots. As the author of many science fiction novels, Asimov imagined two types of robots: those who represented a threat, that rebel themselves against human, and those that he called “pathetic style”: nice but stupid, easy to be manipulated by human. Subsequently, Asimov imagined another type of machine, that is a robot neither pathetic nor threatening, but simply at the services of humans, endowed with security devices. It is the positronic robot, which obeys the three laws of Robotics, a science of which Asimov considered himself the father:

• A robot can not harm a human being nor can he allow a human from being damaged
• A robot must obey to orders given by human beings, provided that such orders do not go against the First Law
• A robot must protect its existence, provided that this self-defense does not go against the First and the Second Law.