Stories of artificial helpers and companions likewise attempts to create them have a long history, but fully autonomous machines only appeared in the 20th century. The first digitally operated and programmable robot, the Unimate, was installed in 1961 to lift hot pieces of metal from a die casting machine and stack them. Today, commercial and industrial robots are in widespread use performing jobs cheaper or more accurately and reliably than humans. They are also employed for jobs which are too dirty, dangerous, or dull to be suitable for humans. Robots are widely used in manufacturing, assembly, and packing; transport; earth and space exploration; surgery; weaponry; laboratory research; safety; and mass production of consumer and industrial goods.
First century A.D. and earlier Descriptions of more than 100 machines and automata, including a fire engine, a wind organ, a coin-operated machine, and a steam-powered engine, in Pneumatica and Automata by Heron of Alexandria
Ctesibius, Philo of Byzantium, Heron of Alexandria, and others
1206 programmable Humanoid Automatons
Boat with four musicians Al-Jazari
1495 Designs for a humanoid robot Mechanical knight Leonardo da Vinci
1738 Mechanical duck that was able to eat, flap its wings, and excrete Digesting Duck
Jacques de Vaucanson
1800s Japanese mechanical toys that served tea, fired arrows, and painted Karakuri toys Tanaka Hisashige
1921 First fictional automatons called "robots" appear in the play R.U.R. Rossum's Universal Robots Karel Čapek
1930s Humanoid robot exhibited at the 1939 and 1940 World's Fairs
Elektro
Westinghouse Electric Corporation
1948 Simple robots exhibiting biological behaviors[4]
Elsie and Elmer William Grey Walter
1956 First commercial robot, from the Unimation company founded by George Devol and Joseph Engelberger, based on Devol's patents[5]
Unimate
George Devol
1961 First installed industrial robot Unimate
George Devol
1963 First palletizing robot[6]
Palletizer Fuji Yusoki Kogyo
1973 First industrial robot with six electromechanically driven axes[7]
Famulus KUKA Robot Group
1975 Programmable universal manipulation arm, a Unimation product PUMA
Victor Scheinman
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word robotics was first used in print by Isaac Asimov, in his science fiction short story "Liar!", published in May 1941 in Astounding Science Fiction. Asimov was unaware that he was coining the term; since the science and technology of electrical devices is electronics, he assumed robotics already referred to the science and technology of robots. However, in some of Asimov's other works, he states that the first use of the word robotics was in his short story Runaround (Astounding Science Fiction, March 1942). The word robotics was derived from the word robot, which was introduced to the public by Czech writer Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), which premiered in 1921
