Types of robot

[Spaz]

I was thinking of creating new articles on the wiki for various sub-types of androids, but was wondering what you guys thought they should each be called...I mean, like just a single slang term or something. This would also help me refine the ASFR Master List page as well.

Basically, I can think of three types:

1: A purely robotic looking android with metallic skin and appendages.

2: A hyper realistic looking android with skin/musculature. (Battlestar Galactica called them Skinjobs, but I was wondering if anyone had any other names for them)

3: Some sort of hybrid, like ones with more plasticy skin sheethed over a metallic skeleton.

[ChocolateKeys]

The 1st could be Metaloid/Metalroid/Metaldroid

[Deep Blue]

2 is the leading.

[Saya]

I've always thought of "Robot" for anything electronic and mechanical that walks around and does stuff on its own. "Fembot" if it looks woman-shaped.

"Android" for a subclass of robot that is coated with soft plastic, silicone, or rubber skin to make it look like a human, regardless of how passable as human it is.

"Cyborg" for anything that's a mix of machinery of organics and robotics, and replicant or synth for biological but synthetic.

Strictly speaking, here...

A robot is any machine capable of both movement and autonomous action via computer programming or remote controlled means.

An android is any humanoid robot. Specifically, it refers to male humanoid robots ( "andr" is the Greek term for "man" while "oid" is basically "in the form of"), while gynoid refers to female robots. Often times this can simply mean a robot with humanoid features but most typically refers to a robotic being which can pass for human, at least on a surface glance.

Fembot is a term used for any female robot. It could be seen as an alternative to gynoid, or used specifically to denote less-realistic and more artificial-looking feminine machines (gynoid being "woman-like" and fembot being a portmanteau of "female" and "robot"). Incidentally, this term is used a lot in Transformers fandom to denote a feminine Transformer, so it could be argued for exclusivity for more mechanical-looking female robots (Austin Powers not withstanding).

A cyborg is any living creature which has had part of its function either enhanced or supplanted by a mechanical device, as opposed to a robot with organic components. That, unfortunately, does not have a concrete term. Commonly used terms for that are "synth" and "biodroid", so we could go with one of those.

As an aside, I honestly think we should be focusing on adding less terms, rather than more. There's already a huge amount of confusion between "cyborgs" and "androids", and adding more terms to denote specific instances would probably only add to that confusion in the long run. A lot of these terms are already interchangeable, barring the difference between cyborgs and androids (as mixing the two is sort of like mixing the definitions for butterflies and moths--superficially they share many traits, but the differences are significant enough to warrant clarification).

[Brytestar]

Just to clarify this...

Andr (ancient Greek)/Andro (modern Greek) = male / man

Gyn (Ancient Greek)/Gyno (modern Greek) = female / woman

[robolover69000]

To further complicate matters the first use of the word 'Robot' in Rossum’s Universal Robots are clearly biological and some where I read that the first story to use Android, the being was mechanical and was clearly fit the description of a robot! Also in some forward to a story collection. Asimov, extended the definition of cyborg to include, a human body with a robot brain, though he saw little point or utility in it. D.A.R.Y.L. could be considered a 'cyborg'. Doesn't that make things clear as mud!

[Propman]

My personal thoughts:

* Robot - an autonomous machine that performs a given task. I would call a roomba or R2D2 robots, I lump C3P0 in this category.

* Android - literally means "man-like". Technically this encompasses obviously mechanical robots like c3p0, but i generally would prefer to call realistic robots that are hard to distinguish from humans "androids" or "gynoids".

And there's three varieties of an android: "a machine", "personality but not 100% human", "a person that just happens to have been built". I like my robots somewhere between the two former classes.

Some (mostly anime) authors use the word android or cyborg to refer to synthetic but organic beings (think 'clones, but not of a specific person'). I prefer to use the word "bioroid".

* Cyborgs. They were born as humans and still are these - including "total conversion" cyborgs.

Another artificial beings that could be semi-relevant here are golems, holograms (think Holodeck or Arnold J. Rimmer),

[Saya]

To further complicate matters the first use of the word 'Robot' in Rossum’s Universal Robots are clearly biological and some where I read that the first story to use Android, the being was mechanical and was clearly fit the description of a robot! Also in some forward to a story collection. Asimov, extended the definition of cyborg to include, a human body with a robot brain, though he saw little point or utility in it. D.A.R.Y.L. could be considered a 'cyborg'. Doesn't that make things clear as mud!

That's because, primarily, the term "robot" had never really been used with a mechanical being before. "Robot" stems from the Czech word robota, which means "drudgery" or "servitude". It basically would be the same as calling a servitor "slave" in English. While R.U.R was groundbreaking sci-fi, it would be Asimov who formally cemented the term with an association with mechanical servitors. "Android" has actually been in use for even longer than "robot" in the global vocabulary, with one example being a patent from the United States from 1863, though "automaton" was used even earlier than that.

_More_ terms to muddle up things. See why I think we ought to have less of them? :p Or at least as few as possible.