Robotics

The word robot first appeared in 1921 in Karel Capek’s internationally popular play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). In Czech, robot means hard, unpleasant work. The play’s robots were artificially manufactured humans, heartlessly exploited by factory owners until they revolted and ultimately destroyed humanity. A huge humanoid, Elektro, was featured at the Westinghouse pavilion at the 1939 World’s fair in New York, accompanied by the robot dog, Sparko. The word robotics, for the engineering of mechanical robots, first appeared in Isaac Asimov’s 1942 science fiction story Runaround. Along with Asimov’s later robot stories, it set a new standard of plausibility about the likely difficulty of developing intelligent robots and the technical and social problems that might result.

Industrial Robotics

Stationary industrial robotics

The first stationary industrial robot was an electronically controlled hydraulic heavy-lifting arm called the Unimate that could repeat arbitrary sequences of motions. It was invented in 1954 by George Devol, and developed by Unimation, a company founded in 1956 by Joseph Engelberger. The first unit was installed to heft aluminum casings in a General Motors plant in 1961. Modernized versions are made to this day by licensees around the world, with the automobile industry remaining the largest buyer.

Mobile load-carrying robots first appeared in 1954 when a driverless electric cart made by Barrett Electronics Corporation began pulling loads around a South Carolina grocery warehouse. Such machines, dubbed AGVs (Automatic Guided Vehicles), originally, and still commonly navigate by following signal-emitting wires entrenched in concrete floors. In the 1980s, AGVs acquired microprocessor controllers allowing more complex behavior than afforded by simple electronic controls. New navigation techniques have emerged. One uses wheel rotations to approximately track vehicle position, correcting for drift by sensing the passage of checkerboard floor tiles or magnets embedded along the path. In the 1990s a method became popular that triangulates a vehicle’s position by sighting retro-reflectors mounted on walls and pillars with a scanning laser on the vehicle (at least three must be visible at any time).

Limited competencies have kept robots out of most workaday operational roles. Computers have invaded everyday life including our gadgets, dwellings, clothes and even bodies; but if pervasive computing soon handles most of our information needs it will still not clean the floors, take out the garbage, assemble kit furniture or do any of a thousand other essential physical tasks. The dream of robots in the home, warehouse or factory floor has until now remained mostly unmet.