Industrial Robot

An industrial robot is an automated, programmable machine capable of movement on three or more axes, used in manufacturing for tasks such as welding, painting, assembly, packaging, palletizing and inspection with a precision and speed that human labor cannot easily match. The engineer Griffith P. Taylor built what is considered the earliest known industrial robot in 1937 out of Meccano parts and a single electric motor, a crane-like device that used punched paper tape to stack wooden blocks in preprogrammed patterns; the American inventor George Devol filed the first robotics patents in 1954, and Devol and Joseph F. Engelberger founded Unimation in 1956, the first company to produce industrial robots, whose early hydraulic machines could position work to within one ten-thousandth of an inch. Industrial robots have since become central to modern automated manufacturing, particularly in the automotive and electronics industries.