A Brief History of Robotics

A Brief History of Robotics

Robotics has its roots in a variety of sources, including the way machines are
controlled and the need to perform tasks that put human workers at risk.
In 1942, the United States embarked on a top secret project, called the Manhattan
Project, to build a nuclear bomb. The theory for the nuclear bomb had
existed for a number of years in academic circles. Many military leaders of
both sides ofWorldWar II believed the winner would be the side who could
build the first nuclear device: the Allied Powers led by USA or the Axis, led
by Nazi Germany.
One of the first problems that the scientists and engineers encountered
was handling and processing radioactive materials, including uranium and

plutonium, in large quantities. Although the immensity of the dangers of
working with nuclear materials was not well understood at the time, all the
personnel involved knew there were health risks. One of the first solutions
was the glove box. Nuclear material was placed in a glass box. A person
stood (or sat) behind a leaded glass shield and stuck their hands into thick
rubberized gloves. This allowed the worker to see what they were doing and
to perform almost any task that they could do without gloves.
But this was not an acceptable solution for highly radioactive materials,
and mechanisms to physically remove and completely isolate the nuclear
materials from humans had to be developed. One such mechanism was
a force reflecting TELEMANIPULATOR telemanipulator, a sophisticated
mechanical linkage which
translated motions on one end of the mechanism to motions at the other end.
A popular telemanipulator is shown in Fig. 1.2.
A nuclear worker would insert their hands into (or around) the telemanipulator,
and move it around while watching a display of what the other
end of the arm was doing in a containment cell. Telemanipulators are similar
in principle to the power gloves now used in computer games, but much
harder to use. The mechanical technology of the time did not allow a perfect
mapping of hand and arm movements to the robot arm. Often the opera-

tor had to make non-intuitive and awkward motions with their arms to get
the robot armto performa critical manipulation—very much like working in
front of amirror. Likewise, the telemanipulators had challenges in providing
force feedback so the operator could feel how hard the gripper was holding
an object. The lack of naturalness in controlling the arm (now referred to as
a poor Human-Machine Interface) meant that even simple tasks for an unencumbered
human could take much longer. Operators might take years of
practice to reach the point where they could do a task with a telemanipulator
as quickly as they could do it directly.
AfterWorldWar II, many other countries became interested in producing a
nuclear weapon and in exploiting nuclear energy as a replacement for fossil
fuels in power plants. The USA and Soviet Union also entered into a nuclear
arms race. The need to mass-produce nuclear weapons and to support
peaceful uses of nuclear energy kept pressure on engineers to design robot
arms which would be easier to control than telemanipulators. Machines that
looked more like and acted like robots began to emerge, largely due to advances
in control theory. After WWII, pioneering work by Norbert Wiener
allowed engineers to accurately control mechanical and electrical devices using
cybernetics.