A Quick History of Modern Robotics

General Motors deployed the first mechanical-arm robot to operate one of its assembly lines as early as 1959. Since that time, robots have been employed to perform numerous manufacturing tasks such as welding, riveting, and painting. This first generation of robots was inflexible, could not respond simply to errors, and required individual programming specific to the tasks they were designed to perform. These robots were governed and inspired by logic--a series of programs coded into their operating systems. Now, the next wave of intelligent robotics is taking advantage of a different kind of learning, predicated on experience rather than logical instruction, to learn how to perform tasks in much the same way that a child would.