Stories of artificial helpers and companions and attempts to create them have a long history, but fully autonomous machines only appeared in the 20th century. The first digitally operated and programmable robot, the Unimate, was installed in 1961 to lift hot pieces of metal from a die casting machine and stack them.
Key Moments in Robot History
| Date | Significance | Robot Name | Inventor |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st century A.D. and earlier | Descriptions of more than 100 machines and automata, including a fire engine, a wind organ, a coin-operated machine, and a steam-powered engine, in Pneumatica and Automata by Heron of Alexandria | Ctesibius, Philo of Byzantium, Heron of Alexandria, and others | |
| 1495 | Designs for a humanoid robot | Mechanical knight | Leonardo da Vinci |
| 1738 | Mechanical duck that was able to eat, flap its wings, and excrete | Digesting Duck | Jacques de Vaucanson |
| 1800s | Japanese mechanical toys that served tea, fired arrows, and painted | Karakuri toys | Tanaka Hisashige |
| 1898 | Nikola Tesla demonstrates first radio-controlled vessel | Teleautomaton | Nikola Tesla |
| 1921 | First fictional automatons called "robots" appear in the play R.U.R. | Rossum's Universal Robots | Karel Čapek |
| 1930s | Humanoid robot exhibited at the 1939 and 1940 World's Fairs | Elektro | Westinghouse Electric Corporation |
| 1948 | Simple robots exhibiting biological behaviors | Elsie and Elmer | William Grey Walter |
| 1956 | First commercial robot, from the Unimation company founded by George Devol and Joseph Engelberger, based on Devol's patents | Unimate | George Devol |
| 1961 | First installed industrial robot | Unimate | George Devol |
| 1973 | First industrial robot with six electromechanically driven axes | Famulus | KUKA Robot Group |
Terminology
The word robot was introduced to the public by Czech writer Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), which premiered in 1921.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word robotics was first used in print by Isaac Asimov, in his science fiction short story "Liar!", published in May 1941 in Astounding Science Fiction. Asimov was unaware that he was coining the term; since the science and technology of electrical devices is electronics, he assumed robotics already referred to the science and technology of robots. However, in some of Asimov's other works, he states that the first use of the word robotics was in his short story Runaround (Astounding Science Fiction, March 1942).
