As electronic media become more pervasive in today's culture, the role of robotics in contemporary art, along with video, multimedia, performance, telecommunications, and interactive installations, needs to be considered. In this article I propose to define a framework for the understanding and analysis of robotic art. I will discuss three pivotal artworks from the 1960s that outlined the genesis of robotics in art and that formed the basis of the three main directions in which robotic art has developed. This article will also elucidate the new issues raised by current robotic artworks and clarify their relationship to the main paths defined by those three early works.