FROM INDUSTRIAL ARMS → HUMANOIDS
A short tour of the field: from R.U.R. on a 1920s stage to bipeds walking onto factory floors a century later.
The term robot enters language in 1920, in Karel Čapek's play R.U.R. — Rossum's Universal Robots. Coined by his brother Josef, it derives from Czech robota: forced labor, drudgery.
The play's robots are not metal. They are mass-produced synthetic workers who eventually rise against their makers — the template for a century of anxiety about machine labor.
Isaac Asimov, Runaround (1942). A fictional safety framework embedded in every positronic brain — and a permanent reference point for real-world AI ethics debates.
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey orders given it by human beings, except where such orders conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
Asimov spent decades writing stories about how cleverly these laws fail. Real robots run on ROS, not ethics — but the framing stuck.
The first industrial robot enters service at General Motors' Inland Fisher Guide plant in Ewing Township, NJ. It was a 4,000-lb hydraulic arm built by George Devol and Joseph Engelberger, lifting hot die-cast parts that would have maimed humans.
By the 1980s, Japan, Germany, and Switzerland turned the industrial arm into a global commodity. Six revolute joints, repeatable to fractions of a millimeter, bolted to factory floors worldwide.
Yamanashi, Japan. Yellow arms. ~750k installed.
Zürich. White arms. IRB lineage since 1974.
Augsburg, Germany. Orange arms. KR series.
Every robot, from a Roomba to Atlas, runs some version of this loop. The 1980s "subsumption architecture" debate was about whether you could skip the plan stage; modern systems blend reactive and deliberative layers.
Loop frequency matters: 1 kHz at the joint, 30–200 Hz at perception, ~10 Hz at task. Latency is the hidden enemy.
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping. The chicken-and-egg problem at the heart of mobile robotics: to know where you are, you need a map; to make a map, you need to know where you are. SLAM solves both at once, probabilistically.
Spun out of MIT's Leg Lab in 1992 under Marc Raibert. They proved a robot could fall and not fall — that controlled instability beat statically stable plodding. The viral videos pulled the field forward by years.
DARPA-funded gas-powered quadruped. Shoved on ice, recovers. The "do not anger it" video.
Hydraulic, then electric (2024). Backflips, parkour, picking parts on a mock factory floor.
First commercial product. Inspections at oil rigs, construction sites, hospitals. ~$75k.
Walking and driving are largely solved. Picking up a strawberry without crushing it, opening a ziplock bag, threading a cable — these remain open problems. The reasons are physical, not algorithmic.
A surge of well-funded entrants betting that human-shaped robots can drop into existing human environments — warehouses, homes, factories — without retooling.
As of 2025: pilots in warehouses. Unit economics, MTBF, and safety certification are the gating questions, not motion.
For 50 years, robotics control was hand-engineered. The recent shift: large pretrained models — vision, language, and action — fine-tuned on robot data, generalize across tasks the way LLMs generalize across text.
Amazon, Symbotic, Locus. Picking, sorting, end-of-line. Highest-volume near-term market.
Japan + Europe demographics. Lift assist, fall detection, social companions. Slow regulatory path.
Intuitive's da Vinci has done 14M+ procedures. Tele-operated, not autonomous — yet.
Tractors steer themselves; weeders, pickers, dairy bots fill labor gaps.
Autonomous trucks, last-mile delivery rovers, sidewalk bots. Regulation-bound.
Drones, ground vehicles, perimeter security. The fastest-deploying segment, and the one with the most ethical weight.
A starter set. None are exhaustive; all are useful.
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END OF DECK / 13 SLIDES / SAFETY: KEEP CLEAR