From helpful companions to murderous automatons, these are the best movie robots in sci-fi. Robots are everywhere these days. Most people will find them in Boston Dynamics YouTube videos, on the road as self-driving cars or even in homes as tiny autonomous vacuum cleaners. And of course, you can find plenty of robots on the big screen too. Even before writer Karel Capek introduced the term'robot' in his 1920 science-fiction play R.U.R., androids and automatons featured in films as early as 1907.

Czech playwright Karel Capek coined the term'robot' in post-WWI 1920 in his play R.U.R. (for Rossum's Universal Robots) that was first performed in Prague in 1921. It was taken from the Czech word'robota' meaning work, to describe humanoid androids designed for menial and repetitive labor. In the play, docile mechanical creatures with human characteristics were produced in Rossum's factory, until one scientist gave them emotions and turned them into killing machines that took over the world.

The story of androids on the silver screen cannot pass without mention of three contemporary classics: The replicants rebelling against their pre-programmed demise in Blade Runner (1982); Arnold Schwarzenegger's gun-toting turn as 2029-vintage cyborg in The Terminator (1984); and Peter Weller as officer Alex J Murphy's alter ego in the dystopic Detroit of RoboCop (1987).