are robots not a subset of automation?
I asked a roboticist to "define a robot" and he said "technically anything with a sensor and an actuator" so, like, a washing machine is a robot
Automation is just a major use case. Category error there. A robot is a kind of machine. Automation is a function.
The sensor/actuator definition is silly. A thermostat would qualify. Your friend sounds uninterested in the philosophy. It’s like dismissing AI as “any software”
“Sufficiently complex loosely biomorphic machine with a domain adapted universal computing capability” is a better definition. Feedback loops and computing element are necessary but not sufficient.
Which is fine. It’s a nebulous category. But to brush aside the definition problem is to lose sight of what’s interesting about the design direction and it’s tradeoffs. For eg, how to solve physical problems without shaping or specializing the environment to suit the machine.