History of Industrial Robotics

Robots visions and inventions can be traced back to ancient Greece. In about 322 Before Century the philosopher Aristotle wrote: “If every tool, when ordered, or even of its own accord, could do the work that befits it, then there would be no needed either of apprentices for the master workers or of slaves for the lords.” Aristotle seems to hint at the comfort such tools could provide to humans. In 1495 Leonardo da Vinci designed a mechanical device that resembled an armored knight, whose internal mechanisms were designed to move the device as if controlled by a real person hidden inside the structure.

The term “robot” was introduced centuries later by the Czech writer Karel Capek in his play Rossum’s Universal Robots (RUR), premiered in Prague in 1921. Robot derives from the Czech “Robota” meaning forced labor, and “robotnik”, a slave or servant. In RUR the rebel of robots against their human creators and eventually kill them, assuming control of the world. Capek seemed surprised by the enormous interest in his robots. Another art that influential piece, Fritz Lang’s seminal movie ‘Metropolis’, was released in 1926. Maria the female robot in the film was the first robot to appear on screen.

Isaac Asimov, the ingenious fiction author, is generally credited with the popularization of the term ‘robotics’. He used it in 1941 to describe the study of robots and predicted the rise of a powerful robot industry. Hartenberg and Denavit in 1955 applied homogeneous transformations for modeling the kinematics of robotic manipulators. The advent of automated flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) in the 1960s established robotics as a scientific discipline. The primary objectives for FMS are reduced labor costs, a high mix product, and factory utilization near factory capacity. A typical FMS combines industrial robots, an automated warehouse, automated material handling, and complex software systems for simultaneously modeling, operating, and monitoring the plant.