The inventor George Devol filed a patent in 1954 for a general-purpose arm to do repetitive tasks. The first factory robot arm, named Unimate, went to work in 1961 at a General Motors car plant in New Jersey. Its job was moving finished metal castings, a dirty and dangerous job that people no longer had to do. The original Unimate had an analog brain linked to an arm moved by hydraulics, which are machines that move using pressurized liquid. It was a very heavy robot arm: IEEE Spectrum says its prototype weighed about 3,000 pounds, and Guinness World Records says it weighed 4,000 pounds.
In 1961 the first Unimate cost $18,000 according to IEEE Spectrum, but $25,000 according to Guinness World Records. IEEE Spectrum also says it cost about $65,000 to make. When the first factory robots arrived, many workers worried that robots would take their jobs, so the Unimate's promoter made it look friendly. On television it even conducted a band.
OSHA describes an industrial robot as a programmable, multifunctional mechanical device built to move material, parts, tools or special devices through programmed motions. Robot arms in car factories do jobs such as welding, painting and putting parts on cars. Many factory robots are programmed to do the same action again and again, the same way each time. Many robots follow programs that tell them how to do a specific job, such as moving from one place to another. One of the most important jobs robots do is protect people from injury by doing dangerous jobs in their place.
About 5 million industrial robots were working in factories around the world in 2025. Factories put in more than 600,000 new industrial robots that year, up 11% from the year before. China was the world's largest market for industrial robots in 2025, with 59% of the new robots put to work. China installed 354,000 industrial robots in 2025, more than the record it set the year before. The United States passed Japan in 2025 to become the second-largest market, with almost 38,500 units installed. In 2024, South Korea had the most industrial robots for its size, with 1,220 robots for every 10,000 employees in manufacturing.
A worker who steps inside a factory robot's working envelope can be hurt if the robot makes an unintended move. Many robot accidents at work happen when people are programming, fixing, testing, setting up or adjusting the robot. Workers must know the hazards when working with robots, because the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration warns that being unaware of them can be fatal. As of November 2026, it says it has no standards written specifically for the robotics industry. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology develops test methods and measurements for robots that work together with people and other robots, so that they finish tasks safely and correctly.
A U.S. government standards lab says robots still have trouble coordinating, communicating and understanding what the other robots and people around them are doing. That makes them less useful when a task needs more than one robot. As of March 2025, the lab, NIST, has said there is a complete lack of ways to measure how well robots work with other robots and with people. As of September 2026, the International Federation of Robotics expects factories to install 655,000 new industrial robots in 2026 and 806,000 in 2029.
Words to know
- Unimate: first factory robot
- hydraulics: liquid power parts
- castings: finished metal pieces
- industrial: for factories
- envelope: robot work zone
