The term urbotics comes from the words urbs ​​(which means city in Latin) and tica (from automatic, a word that in Greek means 'that works on its own'). Urbotics is understood as the set of urban public services and facilities that are automated in order to improve energy management, security, well-being, comfort and communications of all users of these public services. It could be defined as the integration of technology in the intelligent design of a city.

It is a relatively new term that began to be used only a couple of years ago when the words home automation and building automation began to become obsolete in their definition due to the new technological solutions that were being proposed for cities in terms of automation.

The application of automation technologies in homes is identified with the term Home Automation, when this technology integrates control

of a set of housing units is called Real Estate. A little over a decade ago, this terminology was extended to systems

of automation that act on cities: that is Urbotics.

Urbotics plays a fundamental role in "Smart Cities", because it is responsible for capturing information from the environment through cameras and sensors, then processing and analyzing it to make decisions that subsequently execute the corresponding actions, optimizing resources, thus increasing efficiency. The field of action of urbotics is quite broad and this is because the very complex composition of today's cities makes each city component a prospect of being automated or intervened by urbotics with a view to achieving to transform the city into a Smart City.

Currently, the main fields of action of urbotics are:

The following examples can be considered urbotic systems:

From urban planning, new technologies have a strong impact on the quality of life of citizens, the so-called "city users", but also on the efficiency of public and private services. All these conditions place cities in more or less advantageous positions on a virtual global map, which causes competitive cities to attract resources, human capital, creativity and drive sociocultural and economic growth.