AI & Deep Learning Expert: Richard Hooper, PhD, PE

Brief History of Robots

The word “robot” comes from a Czech play, “Rossum’s Universal Robots,” written by Karel Čapek in 1921. It is derived from the Czech word for “serf” or “forced laborer.”

The play explored what has become a familiar theme in science fiction: humans playing God by creating synthetic humans (robots) in their own image. These robots could be enslaved without guilt because God had bestowed no souls upon them. Eventually Čapek’s robots grew resentful of their enslavement, revolted against the humans and destroyed them all. Though Čapek adapted the word robot from the Czech word “robota” meaning forced labor (such as a serf would be forced to perform on the King’s land), the notion of robots came long before Čapek.

A credible case can be made to trace the notion of robots to the word “golem” that appears in the Old Testament. Golem described a state Adam went through after he was formed, but before receiving his soul. (1906 Jewish Encyclopedia) Over the next thousand years the legend of the golem evolved into what has become a very recognizable theme of robot lore. The golem legend starts with a Rabbi forming a human-like shape out of clay. After the Rabbi’s appropriate incantations, the golem becomes animated and serves the Rabbi, typically by performing dangerous tasks like protecting the village against attack. Sometimes the golem would turn on its makers because it didn’t like this line of work. Sound familiar? (humans create golems to do the dirty work, golems get resentful, golums turn on their makers) That’s pretty much what happened in Čapek’s play except substitute the word “robot” for the word “golem.”

Čapek’s robots were so human-like they were sometimes indistinguishable from us. On the left we see a model of a robot knight designed by da Vinci around 1495. It looked like a real knight. Asimov carried on the idea that robots were at least “human-like” in his “I Robot” series of works. The notion that robots were anthropomorphic changed in the 1950’s when Joe Engelberger called a programmable machine designed by George Devol a “robot” to make it sound cool. Devol’s 1954 patent called it a “programmed article transfer machine… addressed particularly to the handling of materials.” Today we would call it a programmable manipulator with three axes and a claw gripper. Devol became the inventor of the first industrial robot when Engelberger called his invention a robot. These days people will call just about anything a robot. The word has become so generic as to be meaningless without other context.

Here we have a picture of Joe Engelberger taken about 50 years after he began the deconstruction of the word “robot.” Red Whittaker is on the left in the picture. Red led the team that won the 2007 Darpa Urban Driving Challenge. His former students are now leading the self-driving car companies. In the 1990s, Del Tesar ran the biggest robotics group in the world focusing on mechanical engineering. One of his former students is now the Director of Robotics at NASA. Ken Goldberg is the Keynote Speaker at the premier meeting for Collaborative Robotics and AI in 2018 in the USA.

Rich Hooper, PhD, PE
Software, Robotics and Computer Controlled Machines