Page 466 - Sensors and Control Systems in Manufacturing

FIGURE 8.35 Sensors in Flexible Manufacturing Systems 419
Tea-serving
karakuri, with
mechanism,
19th century.
Tokyo National
Science Museum.

FIGURE 8.36
The fi rst Unimate.

and constructed by biologist Makoto Nishimura.The first electronic
autonomous robots were created by William Grey Walter of the Bur-
den Neurological Institute at Bristol, England in 1948 and 1949. They
were named Elmer and Elsie. These robots could sense light and con-
tact with external objects, and use these stimuli to navigate.
The first truly modern robot, digitally operated and programma-
ble, was invented by George Devol in 1954 and was ultimately called
the Unimate (Fig. 8.36). Devol sold the first Unimate to General Motors
in 1960, and it was installed in 1961 in a plant in Trenton, New Jersey
to lift hot pieces of metal from a die casting machine and stack them.

8.14 The Invention of Industrial Robots
George Devol applied for the first robotics patents in 1954 (granted in
1961). The first company to produce a robot was Unimation, founded
by George Devol and Joseph F. Engelberger in 1956, and was based
on Devol’s original patents. Unimation robots, Fig. 8.36, were also
called programmable transfer machines since their main use at first
was to transfer objects from one point to another, less than a dozen
feet or so apart. They used hydraulic actuators and were programmed