The word robot comes from a play that was written long ago. The play is called R.U.R., which stands for Rossum's Universal Robots. In the play, an inventor makes human-like machines to take over human work. The play is a critique of machines that dehumanize people. The Czech word robota means forced work. Karel Δapek said that his brother Josef, an artist, came up with the word. Real robots are made mainly to help people, not to be movie monsters.
The writer Isaac Asimov wanted to write kinder robot stories because he was frustrated that science fiction showed robots as evil, mindless villains. He imagined Three Laws of Robotics in his science fiction stories, and they are part of his stories. In his stories the First Law says a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. The Second Law says a robot must obey the orders people give it, unless the orders would conflict with the First Law. His story Runaround, published in March 1942, was the first to lay out all three laws. Each of his later robot stories explored some part of the Three Laws and pushed at the limits of how people and machines get along.
One of the first companies to build robots was Westinghouse, in the 1930s. The first factory robot arm, 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 inventor George Devol had filed a patent in 1954 for a general-purpose arm to do repetitive tasks. That was two years before he met the man who would help sell it. Science fiction brought the two Unimate inventors together. When they met in 1956 they talked about Asimov and his ideas about robots. The name Unimation combines the words universal and automation.
The original Unimate had an analog brain linked to an arm moved by hydraulics, which are machines that move using pressurized liquid. 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. Most robots that do real work in factories look nothing like people. Many modern robots have little function beyond showing what can be done in building machines that look and act more and more like humans.
The IFR's robot history says SoftBank introduced Pepper in 2014 as the first humanoid social robot able to recognize faces and basic human emotions. It also says Willow Garage released the first version of ROS, open source robot software meant to reduce programming effort, in 2009. In 2011 a humanoid robot, Robonaut, launched to the International Space Station, and it was the first humanoid robot in space. A NASA robotics engineer describes a robot as a smart, reprogrammable mechanism that is able to interact with its environment. Experts do not all agree on exactly what counts as a robot.
Words to know
- critique: careful judgment
- dehumanize: make less human
- robota: forced work
- humanoid: person-shaped
