What kind of robots does the man refer to?

W: Hi, Paul, are you ready for your Speech Club presentation this evening?
M: Yeah, I’m going to discuss robots.
W: Robots? You mean those machines that walk and talk like in the movies?
M: No, industrial robots like those used in the automobile and electronic industries.
W: I saw an article about that kind of robots the other day. There were pictures of robots welding cars, but they certainly didn’t look the way I thought robots should look.
M: The robots we usually imagine are made up in science fiction. In industry, robots are designed to do a specific set of operations, such as welding car frames. They are rarely built to resemble humans.
W: Actually, all they need is a kind of brain to give signals, and a mechanism, such as an arm, to carry out instructions, right?
M: Right. Tiny computers become the brain of these robots. The computer sends signals, in the form of electronic impulses, to move an arm and a claw. The claw is the hand that does particular kinds of work.
W: OK. But we’ve had machines on assembly lines doing work for people for years. That’s what started the industrial revolution, remember?
M: But each of those machines can only perform a single operation and it takes months to modify them. The new industrial robots can each do a number of tasks. And it’s easy to reprogram them to perform totally different operations. That’s one reason why they’re becoming so popular.