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Weaving was a large yet labor-intensive industry in the United Kingdom and France by the 18th century; weavers needed help to raise and lower threads to form designs. Inventors attempted to automate the process, and in 1804 a French inventor named Joseph-Marie Jacquard
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In his play "R.U.R.: Rossum's Universal Robots," Czech writer Karel apek portrays the story of a factory that produces thousands of synthetic humanoids. They labor so inexpensively and relentlessly that they have reduced weaving material production costs by 80%. Apek termed the gadgets "robots," after the Czech word robota, which refers to serfs' forced work.
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In 1949, William Grey Walter, an American-born British neurophysiologist and inventor, introduced a pair of battery-powered, tortoise-shaped robots that could maneuver around objects in a room, guide themselves toward a source of light, and find their way back to a charging station using the same components that are still important in robotics today: sensor technology, a responsive feedback loop, and logical reasoning.
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The first industrial robotic arm, known as "Unimate," began to work at a General Motors plant, lifting and stacking hot, die-cut metal parts. It was designed by George Devol and his colleague Joseph Engelberger and could move up and down on the X and Y axes, had a rotating, pincer-like gripper, and could execute a program of up to 200 movements stored in its memory.
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Unimate's robots were huge and hydraulically propelled, which caused them to leak and so limited where they could be deployed. Victor Scheinman created a miniature robot arm with joints powered by electric motors embedded within the arm in 1969. When Scheinman created prototypes of the "Stanford Arm," it could move far faster than earlier robots and without the mess of hydraulics. This allowed robotics to consider utilizing robots in drier, interior situations, or even on desks.
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It was nicknamed Shakey because of its stuttering movement, but what made this robot, developed by a group of engineers at the Stanford Research Institute, stand out was its pioneering artificial intelligence. If you gave Shakey a goal, like as navigating a room or pushing a box across the floor, it could accomplish it by monitoring the world around it, devising a plan, and carrying it out.
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While six-axis Unimate-style arms can lift heavy payloads and manipulate them with precision, not all industrial labor requires strength. In 1978, the Japanese automation researcher Hiroshi Makino designed the four-axis SCARA, or the “Selective Compliance Assembly Robot Arm,” engineered simply to pick something up, swivel around, and plop it down somewhere else with precision — all in one smooth motion.
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Cynthia Breazeal believes that robots must be able to read people's emotions and look to have a personality if we are to properly work alongside them, trust them, and accept them into our homes. With this in mind, she set about developing Kismet, a robotic head designed to elicit and respond to emotions.
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A critical breakthrough of iRobot, created in 1990 by a group of MIT academics, originated from research done for the US military – when they were working on a robot to examine areas for land mines. The team devised an algorithm that allowed the robot to examine every square foot of a particular area.
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Mick Mountz had an idea: instead of having shipping-center employees discover and retrieve products from enormous warehouses, why not have robots do it? He and his cofounders invented the Kiva robot, a squarish, close-to-the-ground orange bot (similar to an extra-large Roomba) that can glide about warehouses and move racks of items. Kiva made use of various low-cost off-the-shelf components.
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"BigDog" by Boston Dynamics is a YouTube favorite due of its incredibly lifelike performances. Over the course of several years, the four-legged robot has been seen tramping through tough terrain, including lush forests, 60-degree hills, knee-deep snow, and brick mounds. It is not totally autonomous; it is piloted by a human, thus it does not require a complex planning and vision system.
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On October 8, 2005, a Volkswagen Touareg called "Stanley" won the second DARPA Grand Challenge by completing a difficult and frequently perilous 131.2-mile route in the Mojave Desert in under 10 hours.
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Geoffrey Hinton, a British-born artificial-intelligence expert, and a small team at the University of Toronto made a significant development in AI by developing the world's most accurate visual-recognition system. It was and still is based on deep learning, an artificial intelligence technology that allows a computer to recognize photos by exposing it to enormous volumes of photographic data.