Short answers, pulled from the story.
The word robot comes from the Czech word robota, meaning forced labor or compulsory service, traditionally the work period a serf owed to his lord. Karel Capek introduced it to the public through his 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), though the word itself was coined by his brother, the painter and writer Josef Capek.
George Devol built the first commercial, digital, and programmable robot in 1954, naming it the Unimate. He sold it to General Motors, and it was installed in 1961 at a plant in Trenton, New Jersey, where it lifted hot metal pieces from die casting machines.
William Grey Walter of the Burden Neurological Institute in Bristol, England created the first electronic autonomous robots with complex behavior in 1948 and 1949. Named Elmer and Elsie, the three-wheeled machines, often called tortoises for their shape, could navigate to a recharging station when their batteries ran low.
Asimov introduced the Three Laws in his 1942 short story "Runaround." A robot may not injure a human being; a robot must obey human orders unless they conflict with that first law; a robot must protect its own existence unless doing so conflicts with the first two laws. He later added a Zeroth Law stating that a robot may not harm humanity as a whole.
Japan has the most robots of any single country, accounting for 40% of all robots in the world. Roughly half of all robots globally are in Asia, with Europe accounting for 32% and North America for 16%.
Some of the earliest automata include the mechanical bird described by Archytas in the 4th century BCE, the programmable water clock tower built by Su Song in 1066, and the humanoid automata built by Ismail al-Jazari in the 13th century, including a waitress that could serve drinks and a hand-washing machine with a flush mechanism. Leonardo da Vinci sketched plans for a mechanical humanoid around 1495.