Over the past 100 years, robots have not only evolved, they have become part of our everyday lives. The word “robot” came into use when Karl Capek’s play about artificial humans was published in 1920. And this is very symbolic, since the “roaring” twenties were a period of economic boom and new discoveries in science and technology.
In the decades that followed, there were outstanding discoveries in a variety of disciplines – cybernetics, mechatronics, computer science, electronics, mechanics – and it is these that robotics relies on. Around the 1930s, the first androids, which could move and utter simple phrases, appeared.
The first programmable mechanisms with manipulators were designed in the 1930s in the United States. The impetus came from Henry Ford’s work on an automated production line. At the turn of the 1930s and 40s, automatic lines for processing bearing parts appeared in the USSR, and in the late 1940s, the world’s first integrated production of pistons for tractor engines with automation of all processes – from loading raw materials to packaging the finished product – was created.
In 1950, in Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Turing described a way to determine whether a machine was a thinking machine (the Turing test). In the 1950s, the first mechanical manipulators appeared that mimicked the operator’s hand movements and could work with radioactive materials. In 1956, American engineers Joseph Devol and Joseph Engelberg organized the world’s first company, Unimation (short for Universal Automation), and in the early 1960s the world’s first industrial robot began operating on the production line of a General Motors plant.
In the 1960s, artificial intelligence labs emerged at universities, and in the 1970s, microprocessor-based control systems were created to replace specialized robot control units with programmable controllers. This reduced the cost of robots by about a factor of three, so that they became increasingly common in a variety of industries. In 1982, IBM developed an official language for programming robotic systems, and two years later Adept introduced the first electrically powered robot, Scara. In 1986, robots were first used in Chernobyl to clean up radioactive waste.
The twenty-first century brought unprecedented advances in the development of robotics. In 2000, according to the UN, the world has already used 742,500 industrial robots. It is impossible to list all the new models and discoveries in robotics over the past 20 years. Here are just a few of them.
In the early 2000s, many companies unveiled new humanoid robots such as Honda’s Asimo and Sony’s SDR-3X. Canada’s Canadarm2 space manipulator was used to complete the assembly of the ISS, and the world’s first neurochip was created at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Munich. The first mass-produced household robot vacuum cleaners (Electrolux) and the first cyber-dog (Sanyo Electric) appeared. The company Bandai presented a prototype robot with the ability to recognize human faces and voices, scientists from Stanford University – a robot STAIR (Stanford Artificial Intelligence Robot), endowed with intelligence and capable of making non-standard decisions, guided by the knowledge about the world around him. A military robot was able to recognize and overcome obstacles – NASA adopted the X1 Robotic Exoskeleton. Robots began to be actively used in medicine during surgical operations.