  Fast proliferation of robots in people's everyday lives during recent years
calls for a profound examination of public consensus, which is the ultimate
determinant of the future of this industry. This paper investigates text
corpora, consisting of posts in Twitter, Google News, Bing News, and
Kickstarter, over an 8 year period to quantify the public and media opinion
about this emerging technology. Results demonstrate that the news platforms and
the public take an overall positive position on robots. However, there is a
deviation between news coverage and people's attitude. Among various robot
types, sex robots raise the fiercest debate. Besides, our evaluation reveals
that the public and news media conceptualization of robotics has altered over
the recent years. More specifically, a shift from the solely
industrial-purposed machines, towards more social, assistive, and multi-purpose
gadgets is visible.
