A roboticist designs, builds, programs, and experiments with robots. Since robotics is a highly interdisciplinary field, roboticists often have backgrounds in a number of disciplines including computer science, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, human-computer interaction and interaction design. Roboticists often work for university, industry, and government research labs, but may also work for startup companies and other entrepreneurial firms. Amateur Robotics is also a growing hobby all over the world.

Robotics is unusual in combining elements of science, engineering, and art. Many roboticists are also deeply involved in the creative arts such as literature, drama, music, and film. Some roboticists have a background in the arts and are drawn to robotics as a medium for expression. The acclaimed Czech playwright Karel Capek (1890-1938) made the first use of the word ‘robot’, from the Czech word for forced labor or serf. Later the Three Laws of Robotics were written by Isaac Asimov.

Rodney Allen Brooks (born December 30, 1954, in Adelaide, Australia) is the former Panasonic professor of robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since 1986 he has authored a series of highly influential papers which have inaugurated a fundamental shift in artificial intelligence research. Outside the scientific community Brooks is also known for his appearance in a film featuring him and his work, Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control. He is now the chairman and chief technical officer for Heartland Robotics in Boston Mass.

In his paper, "Elephants Don't Play Chess.", Brooks argued that interacting with the physical world is far more difficult than symbolically reasoning about it. Symbolic computational approaches to creating intelligent machines had long been the focus of AI since the days of Alan Turing, directly tracing back to the work of Gottlob Frege. Brooks focused instead on biologically-inspired robotic architectures (e.g., the subsumption architecture) that address basic perceptual and sensorimotor tasks.

Sebastian Thrun (born 1967 in Solingen, Germany) is a German educator and computer scientist. He is a Google Fellow and a part-time Research Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and former director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). He led the development of the robotic vehicle Stanley which won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, and which is exhibited in the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History. His team also developed a vehicle called Junior, which placed second at the DARPA Urban Challenge in 2007. Thrun led the development of the Google self-driving car. Thrun is also known for his work on probabilistic programming techniques in robotics, with applications including robotic mapping. In recognition of his contributions, and at age 39, Thrun was elected into the National Academy of Engineering and also into the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in 2007. In 2011, Thrun received the Max-Planck-Research Award. and the inaugural AAAI Ed Feigenbaum Prize. Fast Company selected Thrun as the fifth most creative person in business in the world.

Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro (石黒浩 Ishiguro Hiroshi) is director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory, part of the Department of Systems Innovation in the Graduate School of Engineering Science at Osaka University, Japan. A notable development of the laboratory is the actroid, a humanoid robot with lifelike appearance and visible behaviour such as facial movements.

In robot development, Professor Ishiguro concentrates on the idea of making a robot that is as similar as possible to a live human being; at the unveiling in July 2005 of the "female" android named Repliee Q1Expo, he was quoted as saying "I have developed many robots before, but I soon realised the importance of its appearance. A human-like appearance gives a robot a strong feeling of presence. ... Repliee Q1Expo can interact with people. It can respond to people touching it. It's very satisfying, although we obviously have a long way to go yet." In his opinion, it may be possible to build an android that is indistinguishable from a human, at least during a brief encounter.