The Energon Pub

wiki wrote:The word robot was introduced to the public by Czech writer Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), published in 1920.[15] The play begins in a factory that makes artificial people called robots, but they are closer to the modern ideas of androids, creatures who can be mistaken for humans. They can plainly think for themselves, though they seem happy to serve. At issue is whether the robots are being exploited and the consequences of their treatment.

However, Karel Čapek himself did not coin the word. He wrote a short letter in reference to an etymology in the Oxford English Dictionary in which he named his brother, the painter and writer Josef Čapek, as its actual originator.[15] In an article in the Czech journal Lidové noviny in 1933, he explained that he had originally wanted to call the creatures laboři ("workers", from Latin labor). However, he did not like the word, and sought advice from his brother Josef, who suggested "roboti". The word robota means literally "work", "labor" or "serf labor", and figuratively "drudgery" or "hard work" in Czech and many Slavic languages. Traditionally the robota was the work period a serf (corvee) had to give for his lord, typically 6 months of the year.[16] Serfdom was outlawed in 1848 in Bohemia, so at the time Čapek wrote R.U.R., usage of the term robota had broadened to include various types of work, but the obsolete sense of "serfdom" would still have been known.[17][18]

Wikipedia wrote:Autobot, a faction of sentient robots from the planet Cybertron, are usually the main protagonists in the fictional universe of the Transformers, a collection of various toys, graphic novels, paperback books, cartoons and movies first introduced in 1984. In all but one Transformer story, the "Heroic Autobots" are opposed by the "Evil Decepticons"—the main antagonists in Transformers.[1][2] [3]Both Autobots and Decepticons are humanoid robots that can transform into machines, vehicles and other familiar mechanical objects. Autobots often turn into civilian vehicles but some are aircraft, military vehicles, communication devices, weapons, and cyborg animals. While the Autobots have usually found themselves outnumbered by the Decepticons (early in generation 1 they outnumbered[clarification needed] the Decepticons 2 to 1), the Autobots have always had home-field advantage, having not only the human's military support, but also having more places on Earth to fall back on, while the Decepticons are entirely unwelcome on Earth