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ROBOTS: FROM INDUSTRIAL TO
SOME AMAZING CAPABILITIES
by Tom Carroll
Besides some independently-built creative robots in university labs that exhibited ‘animalistic’
properties, most early robot products were of the industrial variety. Grey Walter’s tortoise
robot, Elsie, from the late 1940s was a unique robot for its day and is still considered to
be a milestone in the evolution of experimental robotics. The development of the
amazing Johns Hopkins Beast built at Johns Hopkins University in the 1960s (shown in
a museum display in Figure 1) was another milestone in the simulation of basic
machine intelligence as applied to a mobile robot base. Figure 2 shows the Hopkins
Beast Automaton II along side Automaton I. These robots could search for a standard
black 115V wall receptacle and plug in for ‘dinner’ when their batteries needed
charging — much the same as one of iRobot’s Roombas, today. Other university-built
robots such as Stanford’s ‘Shakey’ were furthering that new art and science of robotics.
Despite the exceptional experimental qualities of these robots, the real robots that most people used to
associate with the word robot were the first industrial
automatons such as the Unimation Unimate that worked in
factories. These large machines worked tirelessly in industry,
painting, and welding cars. Sparks flew from the welding
heads and the media could not get enough photos of this
new wave of industrial productivity. Times have changed,
indeed. War robots, medical robots, strange crawling
FIGURE 1. Johns Hopkins Beast Mod II.
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robots, tiny robots, and giant robots are headlined in the
media and science shows on TV. Quite often, there are a
bunch of new robots making the headlines that fit within
one category, but I find it interesting to see just how many
types of robots in all categories are being developed around
the world that encompass this emerging technology.
Justin, Germany’s New Astro-Bot
NASA is not the only space agency with a robot
astronaut. The dexterous humanoid robot, Justin (shown in
Figure 3), was designed by the Institute of Robotics and
FIGURE 2. Johns Hopkins ‘Beast’
Automaton 2 with Automaton 1.
