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Preface

The word ‘robot’ was introduced by the Czech playwright Karel Capek 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. The anthropomorphic nature of these machines seems to have
introduced into the notion of robot some element of man’s search for his
own identity.
The word ‘automation’ was introduced in the 1940’s at the Ford Motor
Company, a contraction for ‘automatic motivation’. The single term
‘automation’ brings together two ideas: the notion of special purpose robotic
machines designed to mechanically perform tasks, and the notion of an
automatic control system to direct them.
The history of automatic control systems has deep roots. Most of the
feedback controllers of the Greeks and Arabs regulated water clocks for the
accurate telling of time; these were made obsolete by the invention of the
mechanical clock in Switzerland in the fourteenth century. Automatic control
systems only came into their own three hundred years later during the
industrial revolution with the advent of machines sophisticated enough to
require advanced controllers; we have in mind especially the windmill and
the steam engine. On the other hand, though invented by others (e.g.
T.Newcomen in 1712) the credit for the steam engine is usually assigned to
James Watt, who in 1769 produced his engine which combined mechanical
innovations with a control system that allowed automatic regulation. That
is, modern complex machines are not useful unless equipped with a suitable
control system.
Watt’s centrifugal fly ball governor in 1788 provided a constant speed
controller, allowing efficient use of the steam engine in industry. The motion
of the flyball governor is clearly visible even to the untrained eye, and its
principle had an exotic flavor that seemed to many to embody the spirit of

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Copyright © 2004 by Marcel Dekker, Inc.