Helena Glory, as the daughter of a major industrial power's president, is a woman on a mission. She faces the island factory of Rossum's Universal Robots, the world's leading company in robotic engineering. She is convinced that these new creations called robots they make are deserving of rights like humans do. Everyone else is convinced robots are nothing more than tools for human use. Is it so, or is a robot rebellion becoming a more likely prospect as the robots start to seem more intelligent than first thought?

First performed in English in 1922, R.U.R. is most notable for being the play that introduced the word "robot" into the English language and one of the popular early examples of the science fiction genre onstage