“Where are its hands?” 6 yo Suhail asked this after seeing a robot made by his 10 yo brother Bijal.

“No, it does not have hands,” Bijal replied.

“How can you call it a robot then?” Suhail asked sharply.

And before the discussion escalated to a sibling war, the mother had to enter the scene for a truce.

“How can you call it a robot if it does not have hands and does not look like a robot?” The question remained unanswered.

Kids do ask several questions, and parents, teachers, and other elders have to face questions about robots from kids several times.

We already have compiled a list of 89 questions kids ask about robots.

But this one—”Do robots have to look like humans?”—is a favorite for almost everyone. And it definitely deserves a detailed answer. So here it is.

Do robots have to look like humans?

To answer that, let’s first understand what a robot is.

A robot is a machine that can be somehow programmed to do some job with little or no human intervention.

Does this answer anywhere say it needs to look like a robot? No.
Does a robot have to have hands, eyes, and legs? Not really.
A robot can be any size, shape, or figure.

Let’s see some examples. You can show these to children with photographs to inform them of the truth:
No, robots don’t need to look like humans.

Robots in all shapes and size

Let’s start from our home. Is a washing machine a robot? Yes, there are smart washing machines that technically fit the definition of robots.

What’s their shape? A box!

And how about robot vacuum cleaners? They’re round or D-shaped.

Boeing, SpaceX, and even medium-sized manufacturers, all set up innovative assembly lines with robots.

These robots perform tasks like screwing, welding, drilling, fastening, sealing, fitting, and hundreds of similar jobs.

What are their shapes? Hard to say!

These delivery vehicles are boxes on wheels. Delivery drones are already famous, and both of these are robots.

These robots are specially designed to deliver food, groceries, packages, industrial products, and even warheads during wartime.

Checkout this robot used in disaster response.

These exoskeletons are wearable robotic suits equipped with electric motors that assist in moving the user’s body. Some exoskeletons can even grant the wearer superhuman strength.

And now we come to the robot you probably considered the only robot before reading this blog—the humanoid robot. These are robots that resemble the human body and are designed to mimic our actions and movements.

Robotic surgery – You must have heard this term several times. It means a doctor has operated on a human body with significant help from a machine—a robot.

And again, it’s not required for the robot to have the commonly perceived shape.

Autonomous cars, be that real car running on streets or a robotic car you make using havi elements, are robots only.

Then we have nano-bots. Bots we can’t see. They are programmed to do a specific task like delivering medication to a specific body part or perform some sort of research deep inside an organ. These robots are injected into the human body mostly through veins.

Dog, cat, sloth, locust, snail, snake, spider, eagle, cockroach and what not. Robots are made in several of the birds and animal figures, all of them serve different purposes.

So now you know all the shapes a robot can take—or better yet, you know that a robot can be any shape, or even no specific shape at all.