Short answers, pulled from the story.
Archytas of Tarentum invented the earliest known robot in ancient Greece. He created a wooden bird with steam-powered wings known as the Flying Pigeon in the year 420 before the common era. This machine represented the first instance of a device capable of autonomous movement powered by a pressurized steam engine.
The term robot first appeared in the early 20th century in the year 1921. Czech playwright Karel Čapek introduced the word in his play R.U.R. Rossum's Universal Robots. The word was derived from the Czech word robota meaning forced labor or drudgery.
The Unimate robot was the first to be used in an industrial setting. It was installed in the year 1961 at a General Motors plant in New Jersey. George Devol and Joseph Engelberger developed the Unimate to lift hot pieces of metal from a die casting machine and stack them.
The WABOT-1 was the first full-scale humanoid intelligent robot. Waseda University developed the WABOT-1 in the year 1972. The robot could walk with its lower limbs, grip and transport objects with its hands, and communicate with people in Japanese.
The first robot landed on another planet in the year 1997. The Mars Pathfinder mission landed the Sojourner rover on Mars. The Sojourner rover navigated the Martian terrain and sent data back to Earth without direct human intervention.
The International Federation of Robotics reported that there were about 4,281,585 operational industrial robots worldwide in the year 2023. This number represents a significant increase from the number of robots in previous years. The growth of the robotics industry has been driven by the increasing demand for robots in applications ranging from manufacturing to space exploration.