Page 29 - Welding Robots Technology, System Issues, and Applications

Introduction and Overview

welds was conducted by General Motors, using two 1.25 KW CO 2 lasers for
welding valve assemblies used in the emission control systems. 13

1.2.2 Robotics
If we remember the long history of robotics there are a few things we can learn in
order to understand our present situation. Robotics can be traced back to 270 BC,
in ancient Greece, to the water clocks of the Civil Engineer Ctecibius. His work
had followers like Phylo of Byzantium, author of the book “Mechanical Collection”
(200 BC), and also Hero of Alexandria (85 BC) and Marcus Vitruvius (25 BC). In
the twelfth century, the Arabian Badías-zaman al-Jazari (1150-1220) recollected
some of the Greek developments in the book “The Science of the Ingenious
Devices” [1] (Figure 1.4), and that is how they reached our time. In those early
times the problem was about mechanics, about how to generate and transmit
motion. So it was mainly about mechanisms, ingenious mechanical devices [1],[2].

Figure 1.5. Leonardo’s studies for a humanoid robot

Then in the fifteenth century, Leonardo da Vinci showed indirectly that the
problem at the time was mainly the lack of precision and of a permanent power
source. He designed a lot of mechanisms to generate and transmit motion, and even
some ways to store small amounts of mechanical energy [3]. But he didn’t have the