As we welcome the New Year, I’ve been thinking about how robots have advanced through the years. A robot is a machine that functions on its own or under remote human control to perform useful tasks. For many years robots were little more than concepts in the imaginative minds of science fiction writers. Advances in micro-processors, sensors, and actuators created the technological underpinnings for the first practical robots, which were bolted to factory floors in the 1960s. When computers become small enough, the first mobile robots were built.