Another word besides cyborg or android?
I'm trying to find the word to describe a type of robot. Here are my assumptions about the terms I have found thus far:
Cyborgs are biological creatures that have had cybernetic implants.
Bionics are similar, but their implants are mechanical in nature and do not enhance / change their thoughts or actions.
Androids are purely mechanical with no biological components.
So, what would a robot (with no higher or "self aware" artificial intelligence) be called if someone then grafted biological material into its design?
Said biological material is not intelligent in itself... it was not a conscious being who was combined with a robot, so it brings no intelligence to the new being.
However, the biological material continues to grow (with absorbed nutrients, etc., and no further surgical procedures), and in time the robot becomes self aware and this is completely attributed to the biological material combined with the electronics that have been combining over the course of a few decades.
Would one need to coin a new phrase for this creature or would it be a cyborg even though it did not begin life as an organic being?
I think the word you're looking for is "Biorobot"; a robot that is largely (or wholly) composed of organic components.
Biorobotics is often used to refer to a real subfield of robotics: studying how to make robots that emulate or simulate living biological organisms mechanically or even chemically. The term is also used in a reverse definition: making biological organisms as manipulatable and functional as robots, or making biological organisms as components of robots.
In fiction, I've seen the word shortened to "Biot", for instance in the classic Arthur C Clarke novel 'Rendesvous with Rama'.
As far as I know, there is no word in common use that only means a mechanical being with organic augmentations. However, there is at least one definition of android that would include such a being.
Eric G. Wilson, in his book The Melancholy Android, includes three categories of android, including an "automaton" type android, which he defines as "combining the stiff and the soft, the synthetic and the organic".
In popular fiction, it's also not uncommon for the term cyborg to be used to mean both types of synthetic organisms, e.g. the T-800 from Terminator or the human-like Cylons from Battlestar Galactica are often called cyborgs, though they were never technically human.