Robotics
Robotics is the science of designing, building, and using robots for a set of tasks. A relatively young field, Robotics draws from many fields of engineering, incluiding mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, and mathematics.
History
The term "Robotics" was first attributed to Isaac Asimov, a university professor and science fiction writer, in his short story Liar!, published in 1941.
Unusually, the driving force for much development in robotics may be due the efforts of science fiction authors. Authors such as Asimov esentially defined the popular perception of a robot, and their works may have been the inspiration for the current genereation of roboticists. Recently, robots have appeared in mainstream movies such as I, Robot, Bicentennial Man, and Artificial Intelligence.