Robots
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Challenge yourself with our robot trivia quiz featuring 95 free questions with answers covering everything from famous robots in pop culture to real-world robotics and AI technology. Whether you're a robotics enthusiast or just curious about automation, this quiz will test your knowledge across decades of robot innovation. Answer all 95 questions and discover how much you really know about robots!
30 of 95 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The word 'robot' comes from the Czech word 'robota', which means what?
Forced labour
Robota means forced labour, the unpaid work serfs owed their lords. Karel Čapek, whose 1920 play made the word famous, credited his brother Josef with coining it.
Q 02What was the name of the first industrial robot, installed on a production line in 1961?
Unimate
Unimate was the first industrial robot: Joseph Engelberger's company Unimation installed it in 1961 at a car plant in New Jersey, where it lifted hot die castings off a machine.
Q 03Which branch of AI lets a robot interpret and respond to a spoken command?
Natural Language Processing
Natural Language Processing drove ELIZA, a 1966 MIT chatbot that only turned users' words back into questions; even so, its creator's secretary asked him to leave the room so she could talk to it in private.
Q 04Which carmaker unveiled the walking humanoid robot ASIMO in 2000?
Honda
Honda began in 1986 with machines that were little more than a pair of walking legs, then added a head, torso and arms over about a dozen prototypes before unveiling ASIMO in 2000.
Q 05The first industrial robot went to work in 1961 at a New Jersey plant owned by which carmaker, then the world's largest?
General Motors
General Motors put the arm to work at its Ewing Township plant near Trenton, lifting hot parts from a die-casting machine, a job that exposed human workers to toxic fumes and the risk of losing a limb.
Q 06Which play, written by Karel Čapek, introduced the word 'robot' to the world?
R.U.R.
R.U.R. stands for Rossum's Universal Robots; Čapek's robots are not metal machines but artificial people grown from synthetic flesh, and by the end of the play their revolt has wiped out the human race.
Q 07Which component, the robot's equivalent of a muscle, turns an electrical, pneumatic or hydraulic input into force or motion?
Actuator
Actuator: most are electric motors, but some small robots flex with 'muscle wire', a shape-memory alloy that contracts by a few percent when electricity is applied.
Q 08Which rover successfully landed on Mars in February 2021?
Perseverance
Perseverance touched down in Jezero Crater on 18 February 2021 to search for signs of ancient microbial life; China's Zhurong rover followed it to the surface three months later.
Q 09In science fiction's Three Laws of Robotics, what does the First Law forbid a robot to do?
Injure a human being
Injure a human being: the First Law also bars a robot from letting a person come to harm through inaction, and it overrides the other two, so a robot must disobey an order or sacrifice itself to keep someone safe.
Q 10Robots running ROS, the Robot Operating System, are mainly programmed in C++ and which other language?
Python
Python and C++ are the two main languages for ROS code; the free toolkit, first released in 2007, was pitched by its founders as a 'Linux of robotics' that every lab could share and build on.
Q 11What kind of robot is the da Vinci system?
Surgical robot
The da Vinci is a surgical robot: a surgeon at a console drives its arms through small incisions. Intuitive Surgical's system received FDA clearance in 2000.
Q 12Which robot sensor gauges the distance to an obstacle the way a bat does?
Ultrasonic sensor
An ultrasonic sensor fires sound above 20 kHz, too high for us to hear, and times the echo; the distance is worked out from that delay and the speed of sound.
Q 13Which animated film stars a lonely robot whose job is collecting waste?
WALL-E
WALL-E, short for Waste Allocation Load Lifter: Earth-class, has spent 700 years alone compacting trash on an abandoned Earth when he falls for the probe EVE and follows her into space.
Q 21Which country is home to the industrial-robot maker FANUC?
Japan
Japan: FANUC, short for Fuji Automatic Numerical Control, has run 'lights-out' production since 2001, with robots building other robots unattended in the dark.
Q 22What does a robotic arm's end-effector actually do?
To grip or work on objects
To grip or work on objects: the end effector is the tool at the arm's wrist, and one robot can swap a gripper for a welding torch or a camera as the job demands, hence its other name, end-of-arm tooling.
Q 23What is the study of robot motion without considering the forces that cause it?
Kinematics
Q 14Which astromech droid rode in Luke Skywalker's X-wing during the attack on the Death Star?
R2-D2
R2-D2 sat in the droid socket of Luke's X-wing in the 1977 film and was badly damaged by Darth Vader's fire during the trench run.
Q 15Which branch of AI lets a robot improve at a task without being reprogrammed?
Machine Learning
Machine Learning got its name in 1959 from IBM's Arthur Samuel, whose checkers program improved by playing thousands of games against itself until it reached a respectable amateur standard.
Q 16A rigid body's six degrees of freedom are three straight-line moves plus roll, pitch and which third rotation?
Yaw
Yaw is rotation about the vertical axis; sway, surge and heave are sailors' names for the three straight-line moves, and a robot arm needs six joints to reach any spot at any angle.
Q 17Which toymaker's Mindstorms kits, launched in 1998, let children build and program their own robots?
LEGO
LEGO built the kits on technology from the MIT Media Lab and named them after Mindstorms, a 1980 book by MIT's Seymour Papert about children and computers.
Q 18Which field lets a robot interpret what its camera is pointed at?
Computer vision
Computer vision looked so easy in 1966 that MIT set it as a summer project for students, hooking a camera to a computer to describe what it saw; the job turned into decades of research.
Q 19Which company built Spot, the yellow four-legged robot, and Atlas, the backflipping humanoid, earning a reputation for viral demo videos?
Boston Dynamics
Boston Dynamics spun out of MIT in 1992 and built its early robots for the US military; in 2022 it led six robot makers in pledging not to weaponise their general-purpose machines.
Q 20In business software, what does the abbreviation RPA stand for?
Robotic Process Automation
Robotic Process Automation involves no physical robot: the 'bots' are scripts that click and type through ordinary office software the way a human clerk would, filling in forms and moving data.
Kinematics is the geometry of motion; the maths that works out a robot arm's joint angles also poses the limbs of animated characters, placing a hand or foot exactly where the animator wants it.
Q 24What do you call robots built to work at the scale of molecules?
Nanorobots
Nanorobots are still mostly at the research stage; the idea goes back to Richard Feynman's 1959 lecture, where he passed on a friend's wild suggestion that patients might one day 'swallow the surgeon'.
Q 25What is it called when many simple robots cooperate locally to achieve a complex task?
Swarm robotics
Swarm robotics borrows from ants and bees: in 2014 Harvard set 1,024 tiny Kilobots loose with no leader, and they shuffled themselves into a five-pointed star and then the letter K.
Q 26Which wearable machine moves with a person's own limbs to boost their strength or help them walk again?
Exoskeleton
Exoskeleton frames help patients relearn to walk and take the strain off warehouse workers' backs; not all are robotic, since passive versions have no motors at all.
Q 27What is combining readings from cameras, lidar and radar into one picture of a robot's surroundings called?
Sensor fusion
Sensor fusion plays each sensor's strengths against the others' blind spots: radar judges distance and speed even in bad weather but can't read a road sign, while a camera can.
Q 28What type of robots work alongside humans in a shared workspace, often without safety cages?
Collaborative robots
Collaborative robots, or cobots, were invented at Northwestern University in 1996; the first were safe because they had no power of their own, so the worker supplied all the push.
Q 29Which owl-like robot toy, the must-have gift of Christmas 1998, seemed to learn English from its owner?
Furby
Furby only pretended to learn: it was programmed to swap its own 'Furbish' for English over time, but the myth that it recorded speech got it banned from US National Security Agency offices in 1999.
Q 30What is the term for technology that lets an operator feel the forces a remote robot's hand meets?
Haptics
Haptics, from a Greek word for grasping and touching, found an early use in the remote-controlled arms built at Argonne National Laboratory, which let operators handle radioactive material without going near it.