In this chapter, you learned what a robot actually is and where this term came from. We did our best to define a robot as an autonomous machine that exists in a physical world, can sense its environment, and can act on it to achieve some goals. We also went through a brief history of the field of robotics and discovered that many interesting machines were built prior to the era of real robots (from our definition). Later on, we discussed the basic building blocks of a robot, that is, effectors, sensors, and controllers, which can be combined in numerous ways. Finally, we dug a bit deeper into the architecture of control systems that are useful to keep in mind when designing a robot.

In the next chapter, we will finally see some real robots along with a real programming language.