ABSTRACT
The word robot was introduced by the Czech playright Karel Cˇapek in his 1920 play Rossum’s Universal Robots. The word robota in Czech means simply work. In spite of such practical beginnings, science fiction writers and early Hollywood movies have given us a romantic notion of robots and expectations that they will revolutionize several walks of life including industry. However, many of the more farfetched expectations from robots have failed to materialize. For instance, in underwater assembly and oil mining, teleoperated robots are very difficult to manipulate due to sea currents and low visibility, and have largely been replaced or augmented by automated smart quick-fit couplings that simplify the assembly task. However, through good design practices and painstaking attention to detail, engineers have succeeded in applying robotic systems to a wide variety of industrial and manufacturing situations where the environment is structured or predictable. Thus, the first successful commercial implementation of process robotics was in the U.S. automobile industry; the word automation was coined in the 1940s at Ford Motor Company, a contraction of automatic motivation.
