‘Urobotics’: robots in urology

Robots are far from new; in the fourth century BC, Aristotle developed the concept of automation when he wrote: `If every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others 1⁄4 if the shuttle could weave, and the pick could lyre, without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not need servants, 1⁄4' [1]. The term `robot' (Czech, from robota meaning forced labour) was coined by Karel Capek, a Czech playwright who introduced a robot into his play RUR (Rossum's Universal Robots) which opened in January 1921. The plot was simple: `Man makes robot. Robot kills man'! In 1941, Isaac Asimov, a scientist and writer of science fact and ®ction, ®rst used the word `robotics' to describe the technology of robots, and proposed the three laws of robotics, to which he later added a `zeroth' law [2].

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