Unimate on the General Motors line
Unimate, the first industrial robot, went to work in the car industry: by the museum's record at a General Motors plant in New Jersey, lifting hot castings out of a die-casting machine.
Why it matters
Automation of physical work began with a programmable arm that knew only the positions of its own joints: it could not see the objects around it.
Unimate stored up to 200 positions on a magnetic drum and replayed them point to point. Each axis had a position encoder, a comparator drove the hydraulics until the difference closed, and the robot could wait for an external signal such as a press die opening. So the maker's engineer, at Consolidated Controls Corp., described it in May 1961. Devol's patent was filed on 10 December 1954 and granted on 13 June 1961. The robot cost $25,000, and two Detroit carmakers' spokesmen, by the same journal, winced at the price. The press of the time names neither plant nor date: in August 1962 Popular Science says the first robot had recently begun a similar job for one of the leading auto firms, which kept its trials a trade secret. The absence of vision is what separates this line from Shakey eight years later.