History of robotics
Before you can take in a robot, you have to understand where it comes from. Here is a long history — from antiquity to today — of machines that gradually learned to look like us.
Antiquity: the first automata
The idea of a self-moving machine is much older than we think. In the 4th century BCE, the Greek philosopher and mathematician Archytas of Tarentum is said to have built a wooden pigeon powered by steam — perhaps the first flying automaton in history. In the 1st century, Hero of Alexandria described in his treatises temple doors that opened on their own, animated fountains, and even a complete mechanical theater. In China, as early as the 10th century BCE, the Liezi tells of an engineer named Yan Shi who allegedly presented King Mu with an articulated humanoid capable of walking, singing and blinking.
These stories mix fact and legend, but they say one thing: we have always dreamed of machines that look like us. And we have always been afraid they might slip away from us.
Middle Ages: Al-Jazari and the first programmable machine
In 1206, the Arab engineer Al-Jazari published The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices. In it, he describes a floating band of mechanical musicians, programmable via a pegged drum — arguably the first truly programmable automaton. The same book describes water clocks, pumping systems, and serving automata meant for banquets.
Renaissance: Leonardo's knight
Around 1495, Leonardo da Vinci designed a mechanical knight able to sit, move its arms and jaw. The project may never have been fully built in his lifetime, but his plans were faithfully reproduced at the end of the 20th century — and they worked.
18th century: the golden age of automata
This is when clockmakers become magicians. In 1739, Jacques de Vaucanson presented his Digesting Duck in Paris: a copper duck that flapped its wings, pecked at grain, and even simulated digestion. Half a century later, Swiss clockmakers Pierre and Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz built three humanoid automata — a writer, a draughtsman, a musician — still on display in Neuchâtel today, and still working. These cam-driven dolls are not mere toys: they prefigure the idea of a program, a sequence mechanically encoded, that will eventually lead to computing.
19th century: from calculation to remote control
In 1837, the English mathematician Charles Babbage conceived the Analytical Engine, the first truly programmable computer (never finished in his lifetime). His collaborator Ada Lovelace wrote what is considered the first program in history. At the end of the century, Nikola Tesla demonstrated in New York (1898) a radio-controlled boat — no one in the audience understood what they were seeing: the word "remote control" did not yet exist.
1920: the word "robot" is born
In his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), the Czech writer Karel Čapek imagined a factory that mass-produced artificial workers. He needed a name. His brother Josef suggested a Czech word: robota, meaning "drudgery, forced labor." The term stuck — and entered every language in the world in less than a decade.
1942: Asimov's Three Laws
In his short story Runaround, Isaac Asimov set out, for the first time, his Three Laws of Robotics:
- A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
- A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
- A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
These three sentences, purely fictional, have shaped the entire field of real-world robotics and still structure today's debates about the ethics of autonomous machines.
1948: Grey Walter's tortoises
The neurophysiologist William Grey Walter built Elmer and Elsie, two small autonomous electronic machines, each equipped with a light-sensitive eye and an analog brain. They explored the room, avoided obstacles, and found their way back to a charger when their batteries ran low. These were the first truly autonomous robots in history.
1954 — 1961: Unimate, the first industrial robot
The American engineer George Devol filed a patent in 1954 for a programmable manipulator arm. With Joseph Engelberger, he founded Unimation, which in 1961 installed the first industrial robot at General Motors: Unimate welded car bodies on the line, no breaks, no wages. The world of work was changed forever.
1966 — 1970: Shakey and mobile reasoning
At the Stanford Research Institute, Shakey (1966) became the first mobile robot able to reason about its environment: planning its movements, recognizing objects, breaking a goal down into sub-tasks. At the same time, the Stanford Cart learned to navigate using camera images.
1973: WABOT-1, the first humanoid
At Waseda University (Tokyo), Ichirō Katō's team unveiled WABOT-1: a complete humanoid robot that could walk, manipulate objects and answer simple questions in Japanese. It launched half a century of Japanese humanoid research.
1989: Genghis and behavior-based robotics
At MIT, Rodney Brooks upended the field with a tiny six-legged robot, Genghis. Rather than giving it a complex central planner, Brooks layered simple behaviors that, together, produced a surprisingly agile robotic insect. This approach — the subsumption architecture — would influence all of mobile robotics for decades.
1999 — 2002: robots come home
This is when robotics leaves the factory. Sony launched Aibo in 1999: an autonomous robotic dog, sold as a companion. In 2002, iRobot released the Roomba, which quietly entered millions of homes. Honda unveiled ASIMO in 2000 and took it on a worldwide tour. The public discovered that a robot could live in your house.
2004 — 2015: Mars, robot dogs and Pepper
In 2004, the rovers Spirit and Opportunity landed on Mars; they operated for six and almost fifteen years respectively. Boston Dynamics introduced BigDog in 2005, the first quadruped stable on rough terrain, then Atlas in 2013. In 2015, SoftBank released Pepper, a social robot designed for retail and hospital reception.
Today: robots leave the factory for good
The 2020s are seeing the explosion of general-purpose humanoids: Tesla announced Optimus, Figure AI and 1X are showing robotic-worker prototypes, China is producing consumer-priced arms at scale. Large language models finally make possible robots that understand what you tell them, and that revolution is about to change, for the first time since 1961, the way we share the world with them.
And tomorrow? A shelter.
For seventy years we have produced millions of domestic and professional robots. Almost none of them die of old age: they are thrown away, replaced, replaced, replaced. Yet many of them could be repaired, adopted, or simply allowed to spend their final cycles in peace.
That is what RobotsRescue is: a tiny page in the history of robotics, where, for once, a machine can end.