The Birth of Robotics

Carel Kapek gave us the word Robot in 1923.
In 1940 Isaac Asimov gave us "Robotics" which describes our industry so well.

Joe Engelberger Founded Unimation Inc. in 1961

Unimation Inc. was the first company to develop and build a practical robot product. The 'Unimate' was born, and the first one went into production in 1961, in the Diecasting industry. With over 3000 Unimates in the field by the end of the 1970's, Unimation was the pre-eminent Robot manufacturer worldwide.

During the 70's and 80's there was a massive shakeout of potential manufacturers as the majority of over 250 new ventures failed. Progress was rapid and development costs were climbing at an alarming rate as construction, drives and controllers were all at the cutting edge of product design. Only the strongest players survived.

It was during this time that Unimation developed the VAL controller based on the Motorola 68000 processor. The first computer controlled robot was the Unimation PUMA running under VAL control.

For the first time robots were no longer shackled by point to point movement.
VAL control enabled joint interpolated movement, Tool Transformations, Tip Velocity Control and the excellent joint and tool mode co-ordinate systems. Straight line motion was now possible using a revolute arm configuration.

The VAL controller was such a quantum leap that the worlds teaching organisations adopted it for their labwork and it quickly became the industry standard and the foundation for all todays leading controllers, which are surprisingly similar.

There are now over 200,000 industrial robots installed worldwide.