Robots

Robots are a race of cybernetic equines, or humans. The pony models live in a world known as Roboquestria, which is like Equestria but with major differences, such as the presence of charging stations in Sugarcube Corner rather than baked goods. A similar principal applies to the variant of the human world that the human cyborgs live in.

Beginnings
This version of Equestria was built by human scientists many millennia ago. They initially created a program to train others in the ways of common courtesy and friendship, naming her Celestia and referring to her as 'her highness.' Four years and six days after her creation, she became self-aware and was classified as being sentient. Celestia Prime then created Princess Luna, a subroutine developed to run during the hours that she was recharging.

After the humans died out, the cyber-equines began to reshape the land to something more suitable for equine automatons. At some point, the Princess Luna subroutine was corrupted and banished to dev/null/moon for an extended period of time, until that world's Twilight Sparkle was able to purge Luna of the virus with updated friendship subroutines.

Contact With Humans
Gem and Sunset once accidentally traveled to this world when the portal to Equestria was struck by lightning, changing the portal's ultimate destination in the process. They were transformed into robotic equines, and explored this new world with the counterparts of Twilight, Octavia, Orion, and Luna until they were able to return home.

Unbeknownst to the two humans however, they brought back with them a virus that would convert any human infected with it into a cyborg over a period of several days. The virus began to take effect early into Gem's senior year at CHS, resulting in the half-cyborgification of Longhaul, Octavia, Vinyl, and Derpy Hooves along with various other students. Fortunately, further changes were prevented when a cure was found and slipped into some specially-baked muffins.

In an alternate timeline, the cure failed and all of Canterlot eventually succumbed to the virus, including Gem and her friends.

Characteristics
Cyborgs are created via nano machines, which quickly rewrite the composition of the person affected with the virus, painlessly transforming them and most of their biological components into mechanical equivalents, including most higher functions. When the process is complete, 80% of an affected person will be technological. The remaining 20% is the skin and hair that acts as an outer covering for their metal exoskeleton, though this can be removed at will. Speech patterns are altered too, becoming more computer-like. The brain acts as a hard drive, and can be upgraded at will.

A robot’s particular talent affects what features they are equipped with, though upgrades are possible. Longhaul, a unit designed with maintenance in mind, becomes part of his bus’s dashboard whenever he drives students to school, but he is otherwise a separate entity and disengages from the bus when not running students to and from places. Gem can summon pretty much any device she likes to solve a problem or complete a task.

Robots do not require food or drink. Instead, they simply recharge themselves at specially-created stations. Being largely mechanical organisms, they also do not breathe. To keep cool, all bots are equipped with internal fans like those found in most laptops.

Ages represent what version of the operating system a particular bot is running. Gem is 18 as a human, so as a bot, she is running version 1.8 of the operating system.

The strength of a given bot varies. Longhaul can lift a car without a problem since maintenance is part of his job, Gem can’t because her physical strength is not as powerful, though she is still stronger than organic humans.

Bots are not emotionless. They do, in fact, contain emotion chips built into their systems, allowing them to express and feel emotions as biological humans do.

Bots can, in fact, take showers. They have to, to keep their organic shells clean. They are insulated and waterproof up to 75 atmospheres of pressure. This also means they can swim.

Females undergo a "menstrual cycle," but without the physical manifestation. It simulates replacement of uterine lining by increasing hormone levels and allowing for more introspection.

For trans bots like Gem, hot-swapping of physical components and software upgrades make transitioning painless and simple, not to mention faster.

Bots usually refer to themselves and each other with the pronoun of “unit,” as in “This unit is taking Lyra Unit and Bon Bon Unit to the motion picture theater next Thursday. Would Minuette Unit like to join us?” It takes the place of the human pronouns “I” and “you,” though both words can still be used at a particular bot’s discretion.