Unimate
Unimate was the world's first industrial robot — a heavy hydraulic arm that started working on a General Motors assembly line in 1961. It is to robots roughly what the first automobile was to cars: not the most capable by today's standards, but the machine that proved the whole idea could work and launched everything that followed. Its job was simple and grim by human standards: lifting hot, freshly cast metal parts off a die-casting machine and stacking them, a task dangerous and exhausting for people.
The arm grew out of the ideas of inventor George Devol, who filed a patent for a 'programmed article transfer' in 1954, and engineer Joseph Engelberger, who is often called the father of robotics for turning that patent into a real, selling product. Unimate had no eyes or sense of its surroundings; it simply replayed a sequence of motions stored on a magnetic drum, repeating the same choreography precisely, shift after shift.
Its importance is historical more than technical. Unimate showed factory owners that a reprogrammable machine could take over the dull, heavy, and hazardous parts of manufacturing, and it kicked off the wave of industrial automation that reshaped how cars and countless other goods are built. Nearly every factory arm in the world today traces its lineage back to that first Unimate on the GM line.
In 1961 at the GM plant in Ewing Township, New Jersey, a Unimate arm lifted die-cast metal pieces straight off the line and stacked them — work so hot and risky that doing it by hand could maim a person, now handled by a tireless machine.
The first robot to do real factory work — the spark of the industrial automation age.
Unimate had no sensing of its surroundings — it blindly replayed a fixed sequence of motions stored on a magnetic drum.