Where do robots come from?

As the title suggests, this part of the chapter should be about the history of robots. We already know a few quite important facts, such as the term robot was coined by a Czech author Karel Čapek in 1920. As it turns out, there are many more interesting events that happened over the years, other than this one. In order to keep things organized, let's start from the beginning.

It's quite difficult to pinpoint a precise date in history, which we can mark as the date of birth of the first robot. For one, we have established quite a restrictive definition of a robot previously; thus, we will have to wait until the 20th century to actually see a robot in the proper sense of the word. Until then, let's at least discuss the honorable mentions.

The first one that comes close to a robot is a mechanical bird called "The Pigeon". This was postulated by a Greek mathematician Archytas of Tarentum in the 4th century BC and was supposed to be propelled by steam. It cannot not be considered a robot by our definition (not being able to sense its environment already disqualifies it), but it comes pretty close for its age. Over the following centuries, there were many attempts to create automatic machines, such as clocks measuring time using the flow of water, life-sized mechanical figures, or even first programmable humanoid robots (it was actually a boat with four automatic musicians on it). The problem with all these is that they are very disputable as there is very little (or none) historically trustworthy information available about these machines.

It would have stayed like this for quite some time if it was not for Leonardo Da Vinci's notebooks that were rediscovered in 1950s. They contain a complete drawing of a 1945 humanoid (a fancy word for a mechanical device that resemble humans), which looks like an armored knight. It seems that it was designed so that it could sit up, wave its arms, move its head, and most importantly, amuse royalty. In the 18th century, following the amusement line, Jacques de Vaucanson created three automata: a flute player that could play twelve songs, a tambourine player, and the most famous one, "The Digesting Duck". This duck was capable of moving, quacking, flapping wings, or even eating and digesting food (not in a way you will probably think—it just released matter stored in a hidden compartment). It was an example of "moving anatomy"—modeling human or animal anatomy using mechanics.

Our list will not be complete if we omitted these robot-like devices that came about in the following century. Many of them were radio-controlled, such as Nikola Tesla's boat, which he showcased at Madison Square Garden in New York. You could command it to go forward, stop, turn left or right, turn its lights on or off, and even submerge. All of this did not seem too impressive at that time because the press reports attributed it to "mind control".

At this point, we have once again reached the time when the term robot was used for the first time. As we said many times before, it was in 1920 when Karel Čapek used it in his play, R.U.R. Two decades later, another very important term was coined. Issac Asimov used the term robotics for the first time in his story "Runaround" in 1942. Asimov wrote many other stories about robots and is considered to be a prominent sci-fi author of his time.

However, in the world of robotics, he is known for his three laws of robotics:

• First law: A robot may not injure a human being or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm.
• Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the first law.
• Third law: A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second law.

After a while, he added a zeroth law:

• Zeroth law: A robot may not harm humanity or by inaction allow humanity to come to harm.

These laws somehow reflect the feelings people had about machines they called robots at that time. Seeing enslavement by some sort of intelligent machine as a real possibility, these laws were supposed to be some sort of guiding principles one should at least keep in mind, if not directly follow, when designing a new intelligent machine. Also, while many were afraid of the robot apocalypse, time has shown that it's still yet to come. In order for it to take place, machines will need to get some sort of intelligence, some ability to think, and act based on their thoughts. Also, while we can see that over the course of history, the mechanical side of robots went through some development, the intelligence simply was not there yet.

This was part of the reason why in the summer of 1956, a group of very wise gentlemen (which included Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, Herbert Simon, and Allan Newell) were later called to be the founding fathers of the newly founded field of Artificial Intelligence. It was at this very event where they got together to discuss creating intelligence in machines (thus, the term artificial intelligence).

Although, their goals were very ambitious (some sources even mention that their idea was to build this whole machine intelligence during that summer), it took quite a while until some interesting results could be presented.

One such example is Shakey, a robot built by the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in 1966. It was the first robot (in our modern sense of the word) capable to reason its own actions. The robots built before this usually had all the actions they could execute preprogrammed. On the other hand, Shakey was able to analyze a more complex command and split it into smaller problems on his own. The following image of Shakey is taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ShakeyLivesHere.jpg:

Shakey, resting in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California

His hardware was quite advanced too. He had collision detectors, sonar range finders, and a television camera. He operated in a small closed environment of rooms, which were usually filled with obstacles of many kinds. In order to navigate around these obstacles, it was necessary to find a way around these obstacles while not bumping into something. Shakey did it in a very straightforward way.

At first, he carefully planned his moves around these obstacles and slowly (the technology was not as advanced back then) tried to move around them. Of course, getting from a stable position to movement wouldn't be possible without some shakey moves. The problem was that Shakey's movements were mostly of this shakey nature, so he could not be called anything other than Shakey.

The lessons learned by the researchers who were trying to teach Shakey how to navigate in his environment turned out to be very important. It comes as no surprise that one of the results of the research on Shakey is the A* search algorithm (an algorithm that can very efficiently find the best path between two goals). This is considered to be one of the most fundamental building blocks not only in the field of robotics or artificial intelligence, but also in the field of computer science as a whole.

Our discussion on the history of robotics can go on and on for a very long time. Although one can definitely write a book on this topic (as it's a very interesting one), it's not this book; we shall try to get back to the question we tried to answer, which was: where do robots come from?

In a nutshell, robots evolved from the very basic mechanical automation through remotely-controlled objects to devices or systems that can act (or even adapt) on their own in order to achieve some goal. If this sounds way too complicated, do not worry. The truth is that to build your own robot, you do not really need to deeply understand any of this. The vast majority of robots you will encounter are built from simple parts that are not difficult to understand when you see the big picture.

So, let's figure out how we will build our own robot. Let's find out what are the robots made of.