Robots
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Challenge yourself with our robot trivia quiz featuring 97 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 97 questions and discover how much you really know about robots!
30 of 97 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 is where computer science meets linguistics, giving machines the ability to understand, interpret and generate human language.
Q 04Honda's ASIMO and Star Wars' C-3PO belong to which class of robot?
Humanoid robot
A humanoid robot copies the human body plan, head, torso, arms and legs, and often mimics human gestures and expressions as well.
Q 05The first industrial robot went to work in 1961 at a New Jersey plant owned by which carmaker?
General Motors
The plant was in Ewing Township near Trenton. The job, hauling scalding metal off a die-casting machine, was exactly the kind of work the robot's makers pitched as too dangerous for people.
Q 06Which play, written by Karel Čapek, introduced the word 'robot' to the world?
R.U.R.
Karel Čapek's 1920 science fiction play 'R.U.R.' (Rossum's Universal Robots) is where the word 'robot' first appeared, referring to artificial human-like laborers.
Q 07Which component, the robot's equivalent of a muscle, turns an electrical, pneumatic or hydraulic input into force or motion?
Actuator
Actuators are the robot's muscles: electric motors, hydraulic cylinders or pneumatic pistons that move the joints, while sensors carry information back the other way.
Q 08Which NASA rover successfully landed on Mars in February 2021?
Perseverance
NASA's Perseverance rover successfully landed in Mars's Jezero Crater on February 18, 2021, as part of the Mars 2020 mission to search for signs of ancient microbial life.
Q 09Isaac Asimov's three rules for robots, introduced in his 1942 story 'Runaround', are known as what?
The Laws of Robotics
The Laws of Robotics debuted in 'Runaround' in 1942; the First Law forbids a robot from injuring a human or, through inaction, letting one come to harm.
Q 10ROS, begun at Willow Garage in 2007, ships main client libraries in C++, Lisp and which language?
Python
ROS 1's main client libraries are roscpp, rospy (Python) and roslisp. Its founders pitched the project as a 'Linux for robotics'; the first commit went to SourceForge on 7 November 2007, and the libraries are BSD-licensed.
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 ancient Greek inventor is credited with creating early automatons?
Hero of Alexandria
Hero of Alexandria, a Greek mathematician and engineer from the 1st century AD, is known for describing and creating numerous automatons, including steam-powered devices and self-opening temple doors.
Q 21In business software, what does the abbreviation RPA stand for?
Robotic Process Automation
RPA stands for Robotic Process Automation, which uses software robots (bots) to automate repetitive, rule-based tasks typically performed by humans in business processes.
Q 22Which country is home to the industrial-robot maker FANUC?
Japan
FANUC is headquartered at the foot of Mount Fuji in Yamanashi Prefecture, and Yaskawa is based in Kitakyushu. Kawasaki and Denso round out a Japanese industrial-robot industry that leads the world.
Q 23What does a robotic arm's end-effector actually do?
To grip or work on objects
Q 14What animated film features a waste-collecting robot as its main character?
WALL-E
WALL-E is a love story with almost no dialogue: the last trash-compacting robot on an abandoned Earth falls for the probe EVE and follows her into space.
Q 15Which 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 16Which branch of AI lets a robot improve at a task without being reprogrammed?
Machine Learning
Machine Learning is formally defined by Tom Mitchell as a program whose performance at a task improves with experience, so the robot is never hand-coded for every case.
Q 17How many degrees of freedom does a rigid body have in three-dimensional space?
6
A robotic arm with 3 translational (X, Y, Z) and 3 rotational (roll, pitch, yaw) axes has a total of 6 degrees of freedom, allowing it to reach and orient its end-effector in any position and orientation in 3D space.
Q 18By ISO definition, an industrial robot must be able to move on at least how many axes?
3
ISO 8373 sets the floor at three axes. Most factory arms have six, which is what it takes to place a tool at any position and orientation.
Q 19Which field lets a robot interpret what its camera is pointed at?
Computer vision
Computer vision sits where AI meets image processing, pulling high-level understanding out of raw pixels and video so a robot can recognise what its camera is pointed at.
Q 20Which company built Spot, the yellow four-legged robot, and Atlas, the backflipping humanoid, earning a reputation for viral demo videos?
Boston Dynamics
Boston Dynamics made the four-legged Spot and the humanoid Atlas famous through demo videos of Atlas doing backflips and parkour.
To grip or work on objects is the end effector's job; it is the arm's 'hand', a gripper, welding torch or paint sprayer, the one part that actually touches the world.
Q 24What is the study of robot motion without considering the forces that cause it?
Kinematics
Kinematics in robotics focuses on the geometry of motion, describing the position, velocity, and acceleration of robot components without considering the forces or torques involved.
Q 25What do you call robots built to work at the scale of molecules?
Nanorobots
Nanorobots are built at the nanoscale, 1 to 100 nanometres, and are proposed for targeted drug delivery, diagnostics and minimally invasive surgery.
Q 26What is it called when many simple robots cooperate locally to achieve a complex task?
Swarm robotics
Swarm robotics is an approach inspired by the collective behaviors of social organisms (like ants or bees) where multiple robots cooperate through local interactions and decentralized control to achieve complex tasks.
Q 27Which wearable device assists or augments a person's movement by applying mechanical force to their body?
Exoskeleton
Exoskeletons are used for stroke rehabilitation, for lifting on factory floors and by the military. Not all are robotic; passive versions use springs and counterweights instead of motors.
Q 28What is combining readings from cameras, lidar and radar into one picture of a robot's surroundings called?
Sensor fusion
Merging disparate sources produces a picture with less uncertainty than any single sensor could manage on its own.
Q 29What type of robots work alongside humans in a shared workspace, often without safety cages?
Collaborative robots
Collaborative robots, or 'cobots', are designed to interact directly with humans in a shared space or work within close proximity, often equipped with safety features to prevent harm.
Q 30Which maintenance strategy uses vibration, oil and thermal readings to decide when a machine needs repair?
Predictive maintenance
Predictive maintenance watches a machine's condition, through vibration analysis, oil analysis, infrared and acoustics, and schedules repairs only when the data says failure is near.