Advanced Robotics

1206 · 820 years ago

The engineer Ismail al-Jazari catalogued dozens of programmable mechanical devices in the Islamic world

His treatise, compiled at the Artuqid court in what is now south-eastern Turkey, described water-powered automata, programmable musical machines and a castle clock, work later recognised as among the earliest systematic engineering of automated devices.

1921 · 105 years ago

The Czech writer Karel Čapek coined the term robot in a new play

The play, R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), imagined artificial workers built to labour in place of humans, giving the field its name decades before a working machine of the kind existed.

1928 · 98 years ago

Eric became one of the first humanoid robots publicly displayed

Built in Britain and shown at an engineering exhibition in London, the remote-operated aluminium figure could stand, move its arms and answer questions, drawing large crowds and popularising the idea of the humanoid machine decades before the technology existed to make one truly autonomous.

20th century · 126 years ago

Speech recognition systems reached continuous natural speech recognition at 160 words per minute with 95% accuracy

By the end of the twentieth century the best systems could handle continuous, natural speech at up to 160 words per minute with 95% accuracy. This made voice a practical control channel for robots rather than a laboratory curiosity.

1952 · 74 years ago

Robotics researchers designed the first voice input system

The first voice input system was designed in 1952, beginning the long development of speech interfaces for machines. Speech recognition became a core route by which robots could interface naturally with human operators.

1954 · 72 years ago

The inventor George Devol patented the first programmable industrial robot design

His patent for a reprogrammable mechanical arm, later commercialised with Joseph Engelberger as Unimate, laid the legal and technical foundation for the industrial robotics industry that followed.

1960s · 66 years ago

Manufacturers began increasing industrial use of robots in manufacturing and assembly

Robots have been used in growing numbers for manufacturing and assembly since the 1960s. Industrial deployment provided the commercial base that funded and drove wider robotics development.

1961 · 65 years ago

Unimate began work on a General Motors production line as the first industrial robot

The hydraulic arm lifted and stacked hot die-cast metal parts in a New Jersey factory, opening commercial industrial robotics and launching a market that would eventually place millions of robot arms on production lines worldwide.

1969 · 57 years ago

Shakey the robot became the first mobile machine able to reason about its own actions

Built at the Stanford Research Institute, the wheeled robot combined perception, planning and movement rather than following fixed instructions, work that underpins much of today's approach to robot autonomy and navigation.

1973 · 53 years ago

KUKA built Famulus, one of the first industrial robots with six electrically driven axes

The German manufacturer's design gave a robotic arm the range of motion needed for complex assembly and welding tasks, establishing an architecture that became the template for the modern industrial robot arm.

1974 · 52 years ago

Michael J. developed one of the earliest teaching robots

A teaching robot was developed in 1974, cited as one of the earliest examples of robots designed for human interaction and instruction. It marked an early move beyond purely industrial applications.

1980s · 46 years ago

Marc Raibert and the MIT Leg Laboratory built legged robots demonstrating very dynamic walking

Several robots constructed at the MIT Leg Laboratory during the 1980s successfully demonstrated highly dynamic walking gaits. This established balance and locomotion control as a tractable engineering problem and underpinned later legged and humanoid robotics.

1997 · 29 years ago

Hans Moravec predicted robot intelligence would reach human capacity by around 2045

In 1997 Carnegie Mellon's Hans Moravec forecast that robot intelligence would match a lizard by 2010, a mouse by 2020, and a human by roughly 2045. The prediction became a reference point for expectations about autonomous robot capability.

2000 · 26 years ago

Honda unveiled ASIMO, a humanoid robot that could walk, run and climb stairs

The Japanese company's project, developed over more than a decade, demonstrated dynamic bipedal balance well beyond earlier walking robots and became the public face of humanoid robotics research for much of the following two decades.

• Waseda University's WABOT-1 had already walked as a full-scale humanoid decades earlier

2003 · 23 years ago

IBM ran a fully automated 'lights out' keyboard factory in Texas

By 2003 an IBM keyboard manufacturing plant in Texas operated as a fully automated 'lights out' facility. It demonstrated that entire production lines could run without human presence on the floor.

2006 · 20 years ago

Toy robot dinosaur Pleo used sounds, expressions and body language to convey emotions

Pleo, released around 2006, employed sounds, facial expressions and body language to express emotion. It exemplified the emergence of consumer social robotics aimed at natural human interaction.

2009 · 17 years ago

Scientists from several European countries and Israel developed a prosthetic hand functioning like a real one

A prosthetic hand developed in 2009 allowed patients to write, type on a keyboard and perform other fine movements. It showed robotic dexterity and control transferring successfully into medical assistive devices.

2011 · 15 years ago

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster exposed the limits of robots built for hazardous environments

Existing Japanese and American robots struggled with rubble, radiation and stairs inside the damaged plant, a failure that redirected substantial government and industry funding worldwide toward more capable disaster-response and inspection robotics.

August 2025 · last year

China hosted the first World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing

Teams from domestic firms and several other countries entered humanoid robots in athletic events including sprinting and football, an organised showcase intended to benchmark balance, endurance and task performance across a fast-growing field of competing designs.

• Unitree and UBTech fielded machines among the strongest domestic entrants

April 2025 · last year

A humanoid robot from a Beijing-backed developer completed a half-marathon alongside human runners

The Beijing Yizhuang half-marathon included a separate field of humanoid robots racing over the same course, finishing well behind the human winners but demonstrating sustained bipedal locomotion and battery endurance over roughly two hours of continuous running.

2025 · 1 year ago

Figure AI developed a vision–language–action model controlling two humanoid robots at once

By 2025 Figure AI had produced a vision–language–action model capable of controlling two humanoid robots simultaneously. This linked large multimodal AI models directly to humanoid robot control, a decisive step in autonomy.

2025 · last year

UBTech Robotics placed its Walker S humanoid robots into paid pilot work on car production lines

The Shenzhen-based firm moved its humanoid robots from demonstration into limited paid deployments handling sorting and quality-inspection tasks inside electric vehicle factories, among the first commercial, if still small-scale, uses of humanoid robots on a Chinese production line.

• The pilot deployment focused on tasks earlier automation had struggled with

2025 · last year

India circulated a draft national strategy to expand domestic robotics

The government released a draft policy framework aimed at building domestic capacity in industrial and service robotics, seeking to reduce reliance on imported systems and components as manufacturing and logistics firms increased their automation investment.

2025 · last year

Ukraine expanded the use of ground robots for casualty evacuation and battlefield resupply

Tracked and wheeled uncrewed ground vehicles took on tasks such as carrying wounded soldiers and delivering ammunition under fire, extending a pattern already established with aerial drones into ground robotics and reducing the exposure of personnel on contested front lines.

• Front-line units reported fewer casualties on the most exposed resupply routes

Mid-2025 · last year

SoftBank agreed to buy the robotics division of ABB

The Japanese conglomerate reached an agreement to acquire the Swiss-Swedish group's industrial robotics arm for several billion dollars, folding an established maker of factory robot arms into SoftBank's broader push into artificial intelligence and physical automation.

October 2024 · 2 years ago

Tesla put Optimus humanoid robots in front of the public at a Los Angeles event

Robots described as Optimus units walked among guests, poured drinks and answered questions at a company event, though it later emerged that some interactions were remotely assisted by human operators rather than fully autonomous, drawing scrutiny of the demonstration's realism.

2024 · 2 years ago

Amazon passed the milestone of a million robots working across its warehouses

The company's fulfilment network crossed a symbolic threshold in deployed mobile and robotic-arm units, reflecting more than a decade of steady automation of sorting, lifting and transport tasks alongside, rather than simply replacing, its human workforce.

2024 · 2 years ago

Samsung Electronics took a controlling stake in the robot maker Rainbow Robotics

The increased shareholding gave Samsung effective control of the South Korean humanoid and industrial robot developer, signalling an intention to build an in-house robotics business spanning factory automation, service robots and eventually humanoid platforms.

Late 2024 · 2 years ago

China climbed into the world's top five for industrial robot density

Figures compiled by the International Federation of Robotics showed China's factories installing robots per worker at a rate placing it among the most automated manufacturing bases globally, behind only South Korea, Singapore and a small number of other advanced producers.

2022 · 4 years ago

China held the world's largest industrial robot fleet at 1.5 million units

As of 2022 China operated 1.5 million industrial robots, more than any other country, and was expanding that stock by over 20% annually. This marked a decisive shift in the geography of robotics deployment.

September 2021 · 5 years ago

GlobalData valued the robotics industry at $45 billion with 29% projected annual growth

A September 2021 GlobalData report put the robotics industry at USD 45 billion in 2020, projecting growth to $568 billion by 2030. The forecast framed robotics as a major growth sector and employment driver.

2018–2022 · 8 years ago

Spyce Kitchen operated robotic food-bowl restaurants in Massachusetts

Spyce Kitchen ran two robotic restaurants in Massachusetts between 2018 and 2022. The venture tested the commercial viability of robotics in food service.

2017 · 9 years ago

A 2017 study found automation put 47% of US jobs at eventual risk

A 2017 study concluded that automation alone placed 47% of United States jobs at eventual risk. The finding shaped policy debate about robotics and proposals such as basic income.

2015 · 11 years ago

The DARPA Robotics Challenge tested humanoid robots against real disaster-response tasks

Robots from teams around the world attempted tasks such as driving a vehicle, clearing debris and opening valves, with many falling over on camera; the event is widely credited with accelerating investment in balance, actuation and perception research worldwide.

2013 · 13 years ago

Researchers built a robotic fish that outperformed real fish in speed and endurance

In 2013 a robotic fish exceeded some real fish in average maximum velocity and endurance. The result marked a milestone in biomimetic underwater locomotion.