tecnowraith said:
What kind of category would these robots be put in?
-Agriculture/Gardening
-Assassin/Hunter
-Bodyguard
-Cargo/Delivery
-Construction, Mining or Salvage
-Criminal
-Domestic
-Exploration
-Heavy Duty Robot
-Maintenance/Tech-bot
-Medical/Rescue
-Nanny/Teacher
-Performer/Orator
-Pet-bot
-Pleasure-bot
-Police
-Prototype
-Recon/News-bot
-Security Robot
-Service Robot
-Special Ops
-Sports-bot
-Transport
-Warbot
That's a third category to put after my two (shape and operational type): occupation. As Umbran said, you can have nanobots or androids or whatever do just about any of these... with a few exceptions.
A Dune-esque hunter/killer is a smart munition shape. Pet-bots are usually canoids (the shape of the head can change them into false cats as easily as false dogs). Pleasure-bots, of course, are androids all the way (and nekoid androids are almost always from a pleasure-bot background). Recon/News-bots (I'm thinking autonomous flying cameras as seen in Dark Angel and other places) are somewhere between smart munitions and pocketknife robots - on the other hand, the current Mars Rover is a basic pocketknife 'bot, wheels and all. Transports are going to be appliance robots, most likely, or smartships if sufficiantly advanced.
If you want my opinions on what are the
best shapes for all the other types, just ask.
Umbran also makes a point that mecha and power armour shouldn't be called robots. That is perfectly true... most of the time. However, there are plenty of exceptions to test this rule. EVAs, for example (and I haven't seen all of Evangelion yet, so others may be more expert on this than I), may be controlled by their pilots most of the time, but the EVAs themselves have motivation and have been known to act independantly, thus I call them robots. Zoids, for another example, are often encountered without pilots in 'sleeper' mode, guarding important but abandoned areas, and zoids often act like animals faithful to their masters even when they're not supposed to. And I referred earlier to Ringo's Posleen War saga, in which AI assistants built into suits of powered armour learn how their wearer operates, and can, in theory, operate the suit without a pilot (those suits are cool in so many other ways, too). So no, I wouldn't classify (say) a Voltron Lion or a Veritech as a robot. But their function overlaps with the aforementioned entities that
are robots.
