Let's try a simple exercise of fancy graphical representation of a large number of multivariable vectors, in our case, robots in history, if only just because we love Visual Complexity. We can assume that fictional robots can be included in our timeline. After all, what would robotics be without people like Asimov?

Naturally, a timeline needs to be represented in function of time. However, rather than using a lineal time scale, given the much larger concentration of events in the last 50 years, we can go for a log one, where older events are squeezed in a time slot that may go for centuries and still we may have the same space for a single, very busy year. Basically, the idea is go logarithmic, and compress sparse data into short lengths while we keep dense areas well spaced.

Now, we need to represent robots, but quantify somehow its nature. We decided to do so via a MySQL database that we could modify via web. How do we define a robot, though?. Smartness is not the universal answer: if you ask someone at random who is smarter, Spirit or stair-climbing P3, you might be surprised at how many people think that any 3 years old kid can do the last, yet she most likely will never travel to Mars. Furthermore, if someone asked me if I'd rather have Kismet or Mazinger Z, hey, count me in for the big, dumb, fighting thing!


A major discussion at our labs -that was settled by sheer force of stubborness and endless changes just after everything was already programmed- led us to assume that robots could be characterized via four features: i) smartness, where 0 corresponds to teleoperated robots and 100 to human thinking1; ii) adaptability, where 0 corresponds to non-moving robots in predefined environments and 100 would be ... no, not an inhabited planet, but a metro station at rush hour!; iii) biomimicry, where 0 corresponds to robots that have no similarity whatsoever with a biological being and 100 corresponds to robot that look exactly like an animal -humans, of course, included-; iv) manufacturing, where 0 corresponds to robots whose creator had to model every little piece and 100 to commercial models. To avoid further confussion, we also added a "reality" value that most of us thought should be a Boolean (0=fictional robot/1=real one), but finished as an integer ranging from 0 to 100 because someone thought -very loud- that it could be controversial not to have reality-challenged things.

Fixing a parameter value was also pretty tricky: if you ask 10 different people how smart a robot is, you get 10 different answers. This was solved quite democratically: we enabled a vote system where people opinions on the same robot would be averaged2.

Now, any robot could be represented by a 5 feature vector in time, but, unfortunately, we humans are not very good at visually appreciating 6 dimensional spaces as such. Hence, we did a bit of a trick: we equaled the first four vector elements to C,M,Y and K components in the CMYK color space. The fiction component was assigned to the Alpha channel, e.g. transparency, so that real robots seem more solid than fictional ones. Then, we drew a sphere for each robot, whose color and transparency was related to its nature.

For example, we could state that a hobby tracer mesobot built by a student team is (15,25,0,25), e.g. solid pale violet, if we assume that it is not biologically inspired, its environment will not change much, kids designed it using commercial motors and a microcontroller and it does not have a killing strategy capable of evolving beyond human line-tracking imagination. An ancient automata would be instead completely yellow (0,0,100,0), because it would be done from scratch, biologically inspired like your average kouros and mechanically preprogrammed to repeat the same set of actions over and over. If we do not want spheres to overlap, though, we need to distribute them in a cloud around the year they were created in. And, hey, here comes a new variable in play: size. If just for the word play, we decided that size would be importance: we Googled ("name of the robot" \& "robot") and scaled items according to the number of results. Thus, Soujourner would be larger than, say, RUR, but significantly smaller than Wall-e.


If we check colors through the database, distribution is strongly discontinuous, and there is no noticeable trend, except at the beginning, where robots were all different shades of yellow: bright and solid for real devices and darker and more transparent, for imaginary ones. Indeed, a line is not the best dimension to show interdependencies, so we discussed once more and someone suggested a circle. In a circle, similar robots could arrange themselves into groups and see if there are interdependencies among them. This arrangement was performed via a electrostatic field set of equations, where balls attract or repel each other depending on their distance and color likeness. Some heurisrical parameter fixing work led to field convergency after some iterations and, indeed, groups become now more clear. However, circles do not give sensation of time, so they do not represent trends. Instead, they rather represent types of robots that have consistently appeared again and again in human history, i.e. fictional thinking humanoids.

To get a sense of time evolution, we decided to just up the circle in 3D and not only it did the trick but now the whole thing looked like a DNA helix. Plus everything could be represented in OpenGL and visualized in the web via a 3DXML plugin. This representation presents several interesting features. First, similar robots that are close in time conform groups of balls on a side of the helix: the larger the cluster, the more important this robot tendency has been.

Homogeneous groups at time origin extend to whole rings of the helix, when robots were all automata and ranged only from yellow to green. However, as soon as robots diversified, different trends occupied different sides of the helix that could last for long periods of time -like the aforementioned fiction humanoids or robotic arms- or just be locally punctual, like flying robots before the XXth century. In any case, close clusters would correspond to robots similar in color and, hence, in nature, so transitions between them should be smooth unless something made evolution jump abruptly. Such changes might be correlated -even with some delay- with important events in history, like marxism at the beginning of XXth century or massive commercialization of cheap computers in the 80s. Trends are very clear at the bottom of the helix: yellow clusters of automata and green clusters of fictional androids all the way up to the XXth century. After 2000, though, the helix is so packed with robots that it is not easy to detect trends anymore, yet, there are noticeable streaks of yellow, green, cyann, pink, red and blue, corresponding roughly to humanoids, both real and fictional, rovers, medical robots, toy robots and assistive devices.

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1This could be argued, sure, but let us assume that at the moment ANY human is smarter than your average bot
2And, in case of disagreement, us, all-mighty system administrators, could reset the robot to our favorite value in a really democratical way.

Robotics evolution has had its ups and downs along human history, yet it obviously shows patterns here and there. While people remained optimistic about the posibilities of creating artificial life even after we all read Frankenstein, most researchers in the field found it obvious that current hardware may create anything from a giant rubber skinned T-Rex to a blood flow navigating nanobot. However, software was a completely different thing. At most, we could create something that seemed intelligent to the casual observer, like Eliza, but, would robots ever become aware of themselves? Maybe the right term up to this point is that we can create smart robots and even get them to evolve to achieve new behaviors that would be, nevertheless, severely limited. In any case, it seems that the best we can get is, naturally, a function of available technology and computational power. However, is necessarily this search for the best possible robot the silver lining of robotics evolution?

If we compare human history from, let's say, the Troy War in 1250BC till now with robot history, starting with ELSIE, via a simple lineal approximation, each year in robotics is approximately equal to 48 in our time span.

Thus, we can get some idea on the magnitude of progress in the field. For example, in the approximately 20 years that passed from ELSIE to commercial UNIMATES, we would have moved from the Bronze Age to the Rise of Rome, and then to its fall in the 9 years it took to build SHAKEY, the first navigating autonomous robot.


In 9 years more, VICARM would have robot arms in the Viking probes, and Arthur, King of Britain, would have died in Camlam. Legged robots like Ghenghis would correspond to Marco Polo travels, and, curiously, the Age of Discovery, starting with Columbus arrival to America, roughly corresponds to Dante exploring Mt Erebus and Sojurner arrival to Mars. Kismet, the first social robot, would be somewhere around 1580, when Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I fought over Britain sucession, and then multishaped robots adapted to air, sea and whatnot would appear by the dawn of Industrial Revolution. Both timelines would match back in 2010, with events so unbelievable as nanobots swimming in blood flow and a black president in the White House.


Fiction robots moved faster: our Bronze Age models would be the outer space killing robots from the 50s, evolving into piloted mechas by the time Caesar ruled in Rome. Terminator would be searching for Sarah Connors by the time Angkor Wat started to be constructed and machines would have created the Matrix during the Age of Discovery. After the Industrial Revolution, it would become widely accepted that robots might actually have a soul and Pixar would give us Wall-e and EVA over year ago. The movie would go back to inorganic multi-shaped robots, yet insists on how little separates artificial beings from human souls, not just in terms of intelligence, but also in terms of feelings.

NOTE: This entry has been loosely inspired in today recommended reading: J. Fdez-Macarron, Nuestra galaxia en un campo de futbol (spanish only)

It may be revealing to just observe robot evolution in time, both in reality and fiction. In fact, robots in fiction did not evolve much from a functional point of view until Asimov pointed out that they might have a soul. From the very beginning, they were designed as humanoids or, at least, animals, capable of reasoning up to a limit, yet devoid of free will. Indeed, all robots up to the XXth century, from Hephaestus' assistants to the golem were just supposed to serve human kind, but they could reason on their own to do so.

RUR changed this concept, as robots became a metaphor for opressed social layers in the middle of the Marxist Revolution, a trend that Metropolis was happy to follow. Asimov went one step further and, from the 60s on, robots started to have their own personalities. Still, they were mostly humanoids, until real robots started to be constructed and it became obvious that they would not be ironing our clothes anytime soon.

Star Wars changed this view up to a point: aliens were no longer humanoids, so why should robots be? Instead, we could plug and play R2D2 in our X-Wing or ride 4 a legged ATAT to destroy the Alliance, leaving human shape for protocol droids like C3P0. The next 10 years would not change things much, except in terms of AI: machines would get fed up with human supremacy and revolt against their creators, that mostly wished they had never stopped finger-counting.

The next big r-evolutionary step came with BSG, where robots had evolved so much that they became flesh and blood and the frontier between their kin and humans became so thin that noone was really certain about their nature anymore.

Once upon a time, someone came up with the idea that, given some intelligence, machines could possibly make humans' life easier. These machines would be called robots and, somewhat surprisingly, they were not born in the mind of Asimov, but in classic Greek culture: according to Homer's Iliad, Hephaestus used robots to assist him in building Achilles' new armor (Book XVIII). Literature has always been ahead in these areas, yet the first real known robot was built somewhere around I century. Heron's steam-powered Automatic Theater or Archytas' Dove -mentioned by Aulus Gellius, Noct. Att. L. 10- could be considered the first built robots in written history, although references to some pretty ancient mechanical orchesta lead to think, though, that the first gadgets might well have had the usual "Made in China" label.



They favored common mechanisms employed in entertainment by the time, like steam engines, weights, pulls or hydraulics. The only surviving example is the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient mechanical analog computer presumedly coming from Rhodes, where they had apparently a tradition on mechanical engineering. Indeed, Pindar's seventh Olympic Ode goes like:

The animated figures stand
Adorning every public street
And seem to breathe in stone, or
move their marble feet.

Those first robots, though, were not truly such, in the sense that they blindly followed a tight sequence of actions, predetermined by their creators. In this sense, they were no more intelligent than, for example, the pencil used to write the Theory of Relativity. Rather than robots, these machines were automata. Indeed, automata did not truly show any intelligent behavior despite what it might look like to the untrained eye. In order to make decisions, they would have required some sensing and processing skills, so that they could decide the most adequate thing to do, given the circumstances. Even though the idea of what a robot should do -work we did not want to- was already there, the technical knowledge to build it was not available. On top of this, there was no real need of robot workers at the time, as human ones were fairly cheap or, unluckily for them, even came for free. Most automata were, in fact, used as moving sculptures.



Centuries would bring the basic technology required to build more complex mechanisms, plus precise knowledge on motion and articulations, particularly after Da Vinci decided to open up corpses for anatomical studies, if just to give the Inquisition some headaches. Da Vinci himself designed an automaton resembling an armored knight. Again, most devices developed through the Renaissance and up to the Industrial Revolution were automata, mostly based on pegs and levels.



The master piece of this wave would be the famous Vaucanson's Digesting Duck which was reported to move, eat and defecate through mechanical combination of more than 400 pieces. However, less mechanically complex devices, actually closer to modern robotics, had been built before. Hydraulic Al-Jazari's Peacock Fountain, built in the XII century, used a primitive sensor to trigger a small metallic figure carrying either soap or a towel when water was flushed. This might look like an exercise in mechanics not very different from cuckoos or any other mechanized clocks (Le Gardien du temps, Prague Astronomical clock, etc), but it sets the basis of modern robotics: rather than a fixed sequence of actions, a given machine may act one way or another dependind on what is happening around at the moment. In the fountain case, the system actually decided what to bring to the user -soap or towel- depending on the amount of water on the basin. However, human workers were clearly cheaper than robots yet and jobs no person could do were too complex to achieve with robots. Indeed, even though mechanics could do the trick, machine processing capabilities were still an alien concept, so technology was not really ready yet.

Clearly, the next stage for robotic development would be processing and sensing skills. The XIX century brought Babbage's computation machines. Shortly later, Jacquard's programmable looms -even though not very robot-looking to the eye- were the first reprogrammable machines, based on punched cards. The idea was, obviously, to obtain different patterns at wish without major changes in machinery and, indeed, this type of robots led the industrial application field for years and they are still under use in areas like automobile industry. At last, both technology and need where there, even though only affordable for large enterprises. It is interesting to note, though, that somewhere along the way the concept of sensors was dropped and replaced by fixed, a priori coding. Now, machines could change their behavior, but they needed someone to tell them what to do and, until new commands were available, they would do the same thing over and over. At this point, sensors came into play to give real time input to machines, so they could act one way or another without reprogramming.

Traditionally, sensors have been categorized depending on the magnitude they measure, namely thermal, electromagnetic, mechanical, chemical, optical radiation, ionising radiation, acoustic, motion, orientation and range sensors, where mechanical and range ones have been widely used in robotics. The role of sensors in modern robotics is crucial, as they allow inner programs to fork to appropriate responses depending on dynamic, real time conditions. Basically, asking a robot to operate without sensors would be like asking someone to cross a highway blindfolded and ear-plugged. It could be feasible to just measure a priori how many cars are moving across at a given time frame and how fast they move, and to ask the person to just go for the opening and expect that everything will go as expected. Indeed, industrial environments allow for this type of robots and most reviewed robots up to this point could just operate without sensors, even though some of them used primitive ones, like Heron's hydraulics. However, XX-XXIth century robots would go for sensors for flexibility and adaptability to a changing, usually unpredictable world.

It was the first half of the XXth century that brought everything that was required for modern robotics. The word robot (robota) was first used by czeck writer Karel Capek in his RUR (Rossum's Universal Robots), applied to humanoids that did the hard work according to a program in a very golem-like way. Metropolis would introduce Maria Robota, a full metal gynoid capable of thinking on her own, and, finally, Asimov would introduce robotics as a science in his short tale: Runaroud (1941). Obviously, these robots on paper were still impossible to build at the time, but the idea of using a robotic assistant with thinking capacity was finally set upon a technological basis.

By the middle of the XXth century, technology was also there and, after two world wars provoked a shortage of workers both in Europe and America, there was also a real need to build such expensive devices. Industry was the first to give a shot to robots, and the only customers who could afford one at the time. Devon and Engleberger, two north American engineers, created the Unimates, originally used to move heavy stuff around in factories. Not too surprisingly, General Motors was the first large firm to introduce robots in their factories and they have thrived in the car industry ever since.



These 50s devices fitted quite well the robot definition that the world used for more than 20 years, but, in fact, they lacked something important to fit what robots are supposed to be today: although they could change their activity in a very Jacquard's loom-like way, they did not make decisions. From this point of view, old robots were not smarter than our programmable kitchen robots, that may produce a milk shake or a quiche by simply turning a knob, but, obviously, do not decide what we will eat for lunch. In this sense, if a car factory changes a car model and is using a robot to do the painting, it can be easily reprogrammed to fit to the new height and length of the vehicle and not, for example, paint the windshield. However, some person would have to load a new set of instructions into the thing, as it would not be able to decide that, in fact, the car it is painting is not the same old one. Robots became, at this point, the swiss army-knife of industry.

1700 years might seem an awfully long time to move from automata to robots. However, if we consider that it took humans 3.9 million years to evolve from Australopitecus to Cromagnon, it is not so much. Should we consider evolution in terms of speed, in the 17 minutes it would take humanity to cover 35 km in a highway, robots would be back from a trip around the Earth.

The ability to adapt on their own to a potentially changing environment would be a key requirement for the next, big, robotic step: space, far and beyond. In this case, rather than a lack of human resources, robots were supposed to replace humans in hazardous situations. Indeed, Victor Scheinman managed to put a Vicarm robotic arm in several Viking probes to gather rocks and soils for research. In lunar missions, robotic teleoperation via a video link could do the trick to decide where and how to move. However, Mars missions would require more decision capability on the robot side, as delays in video transmission would make it unfeasible to actually tell the robot where to go before it was already gone within a deep crack or a cliff. Fortunately, AI had already been established as a science on its own right in Dartmouth and computers were starting to reach acceptable dimensions for adaptive robots to be developed. The key idea was simple: given a set of sensors, their readings could be fed to a computer so that it might choose the most suitable line of actions for the input situation. In fact, much work was being conducted in research at the time, along with industrial applications.



Sensors were, as commented, of key importance and, while the first of these robots, turtle ELSIE, could only follow a light, its descendants incorporated as many of them as possible, like cameras, infrared, sonar, contact sensors, etc. Most of these robots, though, were not supposed to do anything more complex than navigate, which, in this context, means to move towards a goal in a safe way. However, they now decided how to reach it on their own. These research robots remodeled the classic definition of robot into "a device capable of moving and making decisions on its own to achieve a certain task".

Even though technology and need were already there, robots were still far from affordable and customers where mostly government, research centers or large industrial firms. In the first case, robots typically included rescue devices, planet rovers, deep sea or volcano explorers, radiation cleaners, etc. Industrial firms were basically concerned with robotic arms and heavy equipment transportation, which in a factory environment only requires the robot to be capable of following a line on the floor. Research produced very interesting prototypes, including humanoid robots like Asimo or HOAP, flying helicopters, scuba-bots, insectoids, swarm robots, etc. However, none of these prototypes was commercialized in a massive way.