History of Robotics

Robotics as a field is (by some reckoning) 50 years old. However we have done a poor job of capturing the history of the field, its pioneers, and our society.

Other IEEE societies are very active history in recording and celebrating their history. For example the IEEE Computer Society has its own journal, the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. The IEEE itself has a history center.

It is proposed to hold an initial meeting during IROS to discuss how we might capture the history of robotics. The meeting is open to all with an interest in this topic. The goal would be to develop a plan of action and identify the resources we need to achieve this.

Some ideas include:

• commission articles to be published in RAM, written by pioneers in the field or by those who have done research in the field
• create a milestones page, like the IEEE milestones page
• where are our landmark robots? Build a list of their physical location, or collect pictures of them if they are no longer with us
• what were the early landmark meetings and gatherings of roboticists? Can we find photos, or put online the discussion minutes that accompanied some of those early meetings (thinking about ISRR).

Present: Peter Corke, Ros Snyder, Alicia Casals

• Write a short article about history activity for RAM to garner interest (Peter)
• Contact IEEE History Centre to understand how they could help us (Peter)
• Contact Bruno about formalizing a “history of robotics” activity (Peter)
  • aim to become a standing committee (SCRH) sometime in the future
• Review the RAS pioneer award list (Ros)
  • invite pioneers to write articles for RAM (Peter)
• Create a page of links to
  • seminal historical robots on the Wiki (Peter)
    • shakey, freddy (edinburgh), unimates, pumas, stanford arm, walkers etc
    • organize by region: Europe, US, Japan
    • Stanford robot museum
    • CMU RI hall of fame
    • wikipedia articles??
    • google for robot museum: MIT, Nagoya, Gordon Bell's computer museum
  • books??: Engleberger, Trevelyan
  • ICRA video archives
  • gallery of historical photos (people, robots) and videos
    • where did Oussama get the clips for his “50 years of robotics” video? (Peter)
  • seminal papers
    • ones we can still remember the titles of!
  • labs