A Brief History of Robotics
Robots have captured the imagination of inventors and storytellers for centuries. While the birth of automation technology can be traced to the Greeks, the first industrial robots were not produced until the 1970's. Today's cutting edge humanoid robots are the result of years of trial and error.
The following timeline presents some of the important moments in the history of robotics.
| c. 270 BC | Ctesibius, a Greek physicist and inventor makes organs and water clocks with movable figures. |
| 1495 | The anthrobot, a mechanical man, is designed by Leonardo da Vinci. |
| 1540 | A mandolin-playing lady is created by Italian inventor Gianello Torriano. |
| 1772 | Swiss inventors Pierre and Henri Jacquet-Droz build a robotic child called L'Ecrivain (The Writer). It could write messages with up to 40 characters. L'Ecrivain's brain was a mechanical computer. A piano-playing robotic woman is also built at this time. |
| 1801 | Joseph Jacquard invents a textile machine called a programmable loom. It is operated by punch cards. |
| 1818 | Mary Shelley writes "Frankenstein" about a frightening artificial life form created by Dr. Frankenstein. |
| 1830 | American Christopher Spencer designs a cam-operated lathe. |
| 1890's | Nikola Tesla designs the first remote control vehicles. He is also known for his invention of the radio, induction motors, Tesla coils. |
| 1892 | In the United States, Seward Babbitt designs a motorized crane with gripper to remove ingots from a furnace. |
| 1921 | The first reference to the word robot appears in a play opening in London, entitled Rossum's Universal Robots. The word robot comes from the Czech word, robota, which means drudgery or slave-like labor. Czech playwright Karel Capek first used this term when describing robots that helped people with simple, repetitive tasks. Unfortunately, when the robots in the story were used in battle, they turn against their human owners and take over the world. |
| 1938 | Americans Willard Pollard and Harold Roselund design a programmable paint-spraying mechanism for the DeVilbiss Company. |
| 1940's | Grey Walters creates an early robot called Elsie the tortoise, or Machina speculatrix. |
| 1941 | Science fiction writer Isaac Asimov first uses the word "robotics" to describe the technology of robots and predicts the rise of a powerful robot industry. |
| 1942 | Asimov writes a story about robots, Runaround, which contains the "Three laws of robotics". These are: LAW ZERO: A robot may not injure humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm. LAW ONE: A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm, unless this would violate a higher order law. LAW TWO: A robot must obey orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with a higher order law. LAW THREE: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with a higher order law. |
| 1946 | George Devol patents a general purpose playback device for controlling machines. It uses a magnetic process recorder. American scientists J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly build the first large electronic computer called the Eniac at the University Pennsylvania. The second computer, the Whirlwind, solves a problem at M.I.T. The Whirlwind is the first general-purpose digital computer. |
| 1948 | Norbert Wiener, a professor at M.I.T., publishes his book, Cybernetics, which describes the concept of communications and control in electronic, mechanical, and biological systems. |
| 1951 | A teleoperator-equipped articulated arm is designed by Raymond Goertz for the Atomic Energy Commission. |
| 1954 | The first programmable robot is designed by George Devol. He coins the term Universal Automation. |
| 1956 | Devol and engineer Joseph Engelberger form the world�s first robot company, Unimation. |
| 1959 | Computer-assisted manufacturing was demonstrated at the Servomechanisms Lab at MIT. Planet Corporation markets the first commercially available robot. |
| 1960's | Johns Hopkins creates the beast. It is controlled by hundreds of transistors and able to seek out photocell outlets when its battery runs low. |
| 1960 | The General Electric Walking Truck was a 3,000 pound, four-legged robot that could walk four miles an hour. It was powered by a computer. Ralph Moser developed the machine. |
| 1960 | Unimation is purchased by Condec Corporation and development of Unimate Robot Systems begins. American Machine and Foundry, later known as AMF Corporation, markets a robot, called the Versatran, designed by Harry Johnson and Veljko Milenkovic. |
| 1961 | The first industrial robot was online in a General Motors automobile factory in New Jersey. It was Devol and Engelberger's UNIMATE. It performed spot welding and extracted die castings. |
| 1963 | The first artificial robotic arm to be controlled by a computer was designed. The Rancho Arm was designed as a tool for the handicapped and its six joints gave it the flexibility of a human arm. |
| 1964 | Artificial intelligence research laboratories are opened at M.I.T., Stanford Research Institute (SRI), Stanford University, and the University of Edinburgh. |
| 1965 | DENDRAL was the first expert system or program designed to execute the accumulated knowledge of subject experts. |
| 1968 | The octopus-like Tentacle Arm was developed by Marvin Minsky. |
| 1969 | The Stanford Arm was the first electrically powered, computer-controlled robot arm. |
| 1970 | Shakey was introduced as the first mobile robot controlled by artificial intelligence. SRI International in California produced this small box on wheels that used memory to solve problems and navigate. At Stanford University a robot arm is developed which becomes a standard for research projects. The arm is electrically powered and becomes known as the Stanford Arm. |
| 1970's | Scientists at Edinburgh University create the Freddy robot, taking steps in hand-eye coordination technology. This first assembly robot constructed a toy boat and car from a heap of mixed parts tipped onto a table. |
| 1973 | The first commercially available minicomputer-controlled industrial robot is developed by Richard Hohn for Cincinnati Milacron Corporation. The robot is called the T3, The Tomorrow Tool. |
| 1974 | A robotic arm (the Silver Arm) that performed small-parts assembly using feedback from touch and pressure sensors was designed. Professor Scheinman, the developer of the Stanford Arm, forms Vicarm Inc. to market a version of the arm for industrial applications. The new arm is controlled by a minicomputer. |
| 1976 | Robot arms are used on Viking 1 and 2 space probes. Vicarm Inc. incorporates a microcomputer into the Vicarm design. |
| 1977 | ASEA, a European robot company, offers two sizes of electric powered industrial robots. Both robots use a microcomputer controller for programming and operation. Unimation purchases Vicarm Inc. during this year. |
| 1978 | Vicarm, Unimation creates the PUMA (Programmable Universal Machine for Assembly) robot with support from General Motors. Many research labs still use this assembly robot. |
| 1979 | The Standford Cart crosses a chair-filled room without human assistance. The cart is equipped with a television camera mounted on a rail that takes pictures and relays them to a computer so that distances can be analyzed. |
| 1980 | The robot industry starts its rapid growth, with a new robot or company entering the market every month. |
| 1983 | The Remote Reconnaissance Vehicle became the first vehicle to enter the basement of Three Mile Island after a meltdown in March 1979. This vehicle worked four years to survey and clean up the flooded basement. |
| 1984 | The CoreSampler drilled core samples from the walls of the Three Mile Island basement to determine the depth and severity of radioactive material that soaked into the concrete. |
| 1984 | The Terregator pioneered exploration, road following and mine mapping. It was the world's first rugged, capable, autonomous outdoor navigation robot. |
| 1985 | REX was the world's first autonomous digging machine. It sensed and planned to excavate without damaging buried gas pipes. This robot used a hypersonic air knife to erode soil around pipes. |
| 1986 | The Remote Work Vehicle was developed for a broad agenda of clean-up operations like washing contaminated surfaces, removing sediments, demolishing radiated structures, applying surface treatments, and packaging and transporting materials. |
| 1986 | NavLab I pioneered high performance outdoor navigation. NavLab deployed racks of computers, laser scanners, and color cameras providing cutting-edge perception in its time. |
| 1988 | The Pipe Mapping computes magnetic and radar data over a dense grid to infer the depth and location of buried pipes. This outperforms hand-held pipe detectors. |
| 1988 | The Locomotion featured a chassis that steers and propels all wheels so that it can spin, drive, or spin while driving. Its software can emulate a tank, car or any other wheeled machine. |
| 1990 | The Ambler was a walking robot that enables energy-efficient overlapping gaits. Developed as a testbed for research in walking robots operating in rugged terrain. |
| 1992 | Neptune articulates magnetic tracks to roam the interiors of fuel storage tanks. It evaluates deterioration in floors and walls using acoustic navigation and corrosion sensing. |
| 1992 | Dante I rappels mountain sides using a spherical laser scanner and foot sensors. It entered the crater of Antarctica's Mt. Erebus but did not reach the lava lake. |
| 1992 | NavLab II was the automated HUMMER that pioneered trinocular vision, WARP computing, and sensor fusion to navigate offroad terrain. |
| 1993 | Demeter autonomously mows hay and alphalpa. It navigates with GPS and uses camera vision to differentiate cut and uncut crops. |
| 1994 | The Dante II, build by CMU Robotics, samples volcanic gases from the Mt. Spurr volcano in Alaska. |
| 1997 | NASA�s PathFinder lands on Mars and the Sojourner rover robot captures images. |
| 2000 | Humanoid robots, Honda Asimo, Sony Dream Robots (SDR), and the Aibo robot dog are showcased. |
| 2004 | The humanoid, Robosapien is created by US robotics physicist and BEAM expert, Dr. Mark W Tilden. |
References
Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, Viking, 1999.
Arturo Sangalli, The Importance of Being Fuzzy and Other Insights from the Border between Math and Computers, Princeton University Press, 1998.
Buchanan, Bruce G. A (Very) Brief History of Artificial Intelligence. AI Magazine 26(4): Winter 2005, 53–60.
Cohen, Jonathan. Human Robots in Myth and Science. NY: A.S.Barnes, 1967.
Feigenbaum, E.A. & Feldman, J. (eds.) Computers and Thought. NY: McGraw-Hill, 1963.
McCorduck, Pamela. Machines Who Think. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1979.