12 Milestones in the History of Robotics 

February 24, 2025 20:10

February 19 report: According to the US website Live Science on February 3, the development of robots has gone through twelve important milestones from Isaac Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics" to the bipedal robots you can buy today.
Few technologies have captured the human imagination as strongly as robots. For decades, machines that can walk and talk like humans have been a common element in science fiction. The reality, however, has been more mundane - most robots in the real world are just arm-like mechanical devices used for repetitive factory work. But recently, breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) and robot hardware mean that the intelligent humanoid robots we imagine are getting closer to reality.
Here are the twelve most important milestones that have led us to where we are today.

1921: The Birth of the Word "Robot"

Since ancient times, people have imagined the possibility of creating artificial humans - from the clay golem in Jewish folklore to the mechanical servants of Hephaestus, the god of fire and craftsmanship in Greek mythology. Throughout history, there have been many complex automatic devices that amazed audiences with their lifelike appearance. But the word "robot" was first coined by Czech writer Karel Čapek in his 1921 play "R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)". The word comes from the Czech word "robota", meaning forced labor. The play tells the story of synthetic organic workers rising up against their human masters. Many subsequent works have repeated this narrative.

1942: The "Three Laws of Robotics"

Robots became a common element in science fiction. Legendary writer Isaac Asimov focused on robots in many of his stories. One of the important themes in his works was how these artificial beings interacted with human society. In his 1942 short story "Runaround", he proposed the "Three Laws of Robotics" to regulate the behavior of all robots in his fictional universe. The First Law prohibits robots from harming humans. The Second Law requires robots to obey humans, unless obedience would violate the First Law. The Third Law requires robots to protect themselves as long as it does not conflict with the first two laws. Although completely fictional, Asimov's Three Laws have had a profound impact on the development of AI and robot ethics frameworks.

1961: The First Industrial Robot

The ideas from science fiction didn't take long to seep into the real world. In the early 1950s, inventor George Devol began developing a mechanical arm that could perform repetitive tasks in factories. He collaborated with entrepreneur Joseph Engelberger to establish the world's first robot company - Unimation. In 1961, their Unimate robot began working on the assembly line at a General Motors factory in New Jersey. This hydraulically-driven mechanical arm had five degrees of freedom (DoF). "Degrees of freedom" is a measure of flexibility. Five degrees of freedom mean that its mechanical arm can move or rotate in five different directions. Programming the device required users to manually move the arm to different positions to teach it the desired sequence of movements, which would then be recorded in a magnetic storage device called a magnetic drum.

1966: The First Intelligent Mobile Robot

By the mid-1960s, significant progress had been made in the mechanical performance of robots, but they were essentially still "dumb machines" that required manual programming. In 1966, researchers at the Stanford Research Institute began developing a wheeled robot equipped with a camera and tactile sensors. It can reason about its own actions, make plans and navigate through the real world. It can move autonomously between multiple rooms, avoid obstacles, open doors, press light switches and push boxes. This robot, named "Shakey" by the research team, has received high attention from the media. Life magazine even called it the first "electronic person". A key advancement behind this robot is its hierarchical software architecture. This enables it to reason about tasks, and many later robots have borrowed from this.

1969: The Arm That Spawned an Industry

Although the Unimate was the first industrial robot to go into production, the Stanford Arm became the blueprint for the emerging industrial robot industry. In 1969, Victor Scheinman, then a student at Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, designed this six-degree-of-freedom arm. It was electrically driven and computer-controlled. Over the next few years, Scheinman built increasingly sophisticated arms at Stanford and MIT, eventually founding Vicarm in 1974 to commercialize his research. In 1977, he sold his design to Unimation, which launched the Programmable Universal Machine for Assembly (PUMA) robot in 1978. The first customer was General Motors, which used it to assemble car parts.

 

1970: The First Lunar Robot

The birth of robots coincided with another major technological leap - the arrival of the space age. Scientists recognized that remotely controlled or even autonomous machines would be powerful tools for exploring the solar system. In 1970, the Soviet Union sent the world's first robotic lunar rover, Lunokhod 1, to the moon. It resembled a bathtub and had eight independently driven wheels. It could be remotely controlled from Earth via an antenna and four cameras. This solar-powered rover operated for nearly a year (about three and a half times its designed lifespan), traveling 6.5 miles (about 10.5 kilometers). It also used a retractable probe to conduct over 500 tests on the mechanical properties of the lunar soil.

 

1990: Rewriting AI Theory

By the 1980s, industrial robots capable of performing repetitive tasks in controlled environments were common, but efforts to create more flexible and autonomous machines had stalled. Australian robotics expert Rodney Brooks intuitively believed that this stagnation was due to the top-down approach adopted by researchers. This approach focused on endowing machines with abstract reasoning abilities and developing complex mathematical symbol systems to represent their surroundings. Brooks drew inspiration from nature and focused on the feedback loop between perception and action, which enables animals to exhibit complex behaviors. In his 1990 paper "Elephants Don't Play Chess", he outlined this bottom-up approach and demonstrated that by adopting it, multiple simple behavioral modules could be combined to solve challenges that robots couldn't handle at the time.

1996: The First Humanoid Walking Robot

Despite significant progress in robotics, most machines were still far from the robots depicted in science fiction. This changed in 1996 when Honda introduced the P2 robot. The P2 was the first humanoid robot capable of walking on two legs independently. Honda had been researching bipedal walking since the late 1980s, attempting to mimic human walking. Research on the P2 and its successors, the P3 and P4, eventually led to the creation of the company's iconic ASIMO humanoid robot. It made its debut in 2000 and set the standard for future humanoid robot technology.

2000: The Da Vinci Surgical Robot Most commercial robot companies focus on

 developing machines designed to replace manual labor in factories. Intuitive Surgical, however, decided to concentrate on the delicate process of minimally invasive surgery. They created a four-armed robotic surgical system called "Da Vinci". Surgeons can control this system remotely. The robot's mechanical arms can hold surgical instruments such as scalpels, forceps, and scissors, allowing surgeons to perform ultra-precise operations. The device was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for use in 2000 and has been used in over 14 million surgeries to date.

2010: Autonomous Vehicle Project

For many years, there have been some scattered experiments in the field of autonomous vehicles, but the first company to invest significant resources in developing autonomous vehicles was Google. The company began researching autonomous vehicles in 2009 and announced the project in October 2010 after driving over 140,000 miles (about 230,000 kilometers) on public roads. Early experiments were conducted using modified Toyota Prius cars with a safety driver behind the steering wheel. However, in 2015, the company completed its first fully autonomous drive on public roads with a custom vehicle. After spinning off from Google, Waymo launched the first public test of its driverless taxi service in Phoenix in 2017.

2012: DARPA Robotics Challenge

One of the main drivers behind recent breakthroughs in humanoid robots has been the DARPA Robotics Challenge. Launched by DARPA in 2012, the competition required teams to develop semi-autonomous robots capable of performing complex tasks in simulated disaster areas. These tasks included traversing rubble, climbing ladders, closing leaking valves, and even driving light vehicles. The final event was held in 2015. Some teams used their own developed robots, while six teams used the humanoid robot "Atlas" manufactured by Boston Dynamics. After the competition, Boston Dynamics continued to develop the robot, demonstrating increasingly advanced capabilities over the years, such as outdoor running, jumping, and parkour.

2020: First Bipedal Robot Goes to Market

After selling two Digit robots to Ford, Agility Robotics became the first company to launch a commercial bipedal robot. Technically, it is not a humanoid robot because its "backward-bending" legs are more like those of birds than humans. The robot is roughly the size and shape of a small human and is designed for use in warehouses and other industrial settings. This release marked the beginning of a commercial humanoid robot boom, with companies like Tesla, "Humanoid" AI, and 1X Technology soon launching their own products. Costs are rapidly decreasing.