ABSTRACT
The concept of robots has been one of the central ones for the artifi cial intelligence (AI) (Russell and Norvig 2009). In AI, robots were originally associated with machines assisting humans in their everyday life. Robots were supposed to support, help, or protect humans. These machines should be able to do what man cannot, excel in areas where humans reached their limits, or where certain actions would put their life or health in danger. Robots were expected to be more or less universal in terms of scope of actions they would be able to carry out. Thus, implicitly robots would be envisaged to be man-like. So robots should be mobile in order to follow man, or to even substitute man in some situations. Robots should also communicate in a man-like fashion, that is, should be able to speak and interpret voice commands. Besides the practical usefulness of such features, this would make it easier for people to interact with robots on a daily basis. Robots could be machines extending human capabilities, but in some cases they would be expected to be companions to humans, for example, robotic pets. This would make robots in human environment more than just machines (devices). In fact, they could be implicitly
treated as living beings. Originally, such a perspective would lead to a number of important questions concerning the status of robots in human society, for example, would robots feel, think, and ultimately would they have consciousness.
