# ROBOTICS / Machines that move

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Category: Technology
Slides: 13
Updated: 2026-05-17T20:55:45.770Z
Tags: catalog, tech, robotics

## Summary

FROM INDUSTRIAL ARMS → HUMANOIDS Key sections include: ROBOTICS / Machines that move; The word.; Three Laws.; Unimate at GM.; The industrial era.; Sense. Plan. Act.; SLAM : build a map of a place you've never been.; Boston Dynamics.; Manipulation is still hard.; The humanoid wave..

## Slide Outline

1. ROBOTICS / Machines that move
2. The word.
3. Three Laws.
4. Unimate at GM.
5. The industrial era.
6. Sense. Plan. Act.
7. SLAM : build a map of a place you've never been.
8. Boston Dynamics.
9. Manipulation is still hard.
10. The humanoid wave.
11. The AI brain.
12. Where the money goes.
13. References & further viewing.

## Slide Transcript

### Slide 1: ROBOTICS /

 Machines

 that move

- // DECK 13 / TECH-ROBOTICS / 2026
- FROM INDUSTRIAL ARMS → HUMANOIDS
- A short tour of the field: from R.U.R. on a 1920s stage to bipeds
- walking onto factory floors a century later.
- SAFETY: KEEP CLEAR / WATCH HANDS

### Slide 2: The word.

- 01 / ETYMOLOGY
- The term robot enters language in 1920,
- in Karel Čapek's play
- R.U.R. — Rossum's Universal Robots. Coined by his brother Josef,
- it derives from Czech robota: forced labor, drudgery.
- The play's robots are not metal. They are mass-produced synthetic workers
- who eventually rise against their makers — the template for a century of
- anxiety about machine labor.
- > PLAY : R.U.R.
- > AUTHOR : KAREL ČAPEK
- > PREMIERE : PRAGUE, 25 JAN 1921
- > ETYMOLOGY : robota (Cz.) — forced labor

### Slide 3: Three Laws.

- 02 / FICTION SHAPES POLICY
- Isaac Asimov, Runaround (1942). A fictional safety framework
- embedded in every positronic brain — and a permanent reference point
- for real-world AI ethics debates.
- Law 01
- A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
- Law 02
- A robot must obey orders given it by human beings, except where such orders conflict with the First Law.
- Law 03
- A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
- Asimov spent decades writing stories about how cleverly these laws fail.
- Real robots run on ROS, not ethics — but the framing stuck.

### Slide 4: Unimate at GM.

- 03 / 1961
- The first industrial robot enters service at General Motors' Inland Fisher
- Guide plant in Ewing Township, NJ. It was a 4,000-lb hydraulic arm built by
- George Devol and Joseph Engelberger, lifting hot die-cast parts that would
- have maimed humans.
- > UNIT : UNIMATE 1900
- > YEAR : 1961
- > SITE : GM TRENTON / DIE CASTING
- > PAYLOAD : ~225 kg
- > CONTROL : MAGNETIC DRUM, HYDRAULIC

### Slide 5: The industrial era.

- 04 / SCALING THE ARM
- By the 1980s, Japan, Germany, and Switzerland turned the industrial arm
- into a global commodity. Six revolute joints, repeatable to fractions of
- a millimeter, bolted to factory floors worldwide.
- FANUC
- Yamanashi, Japan. Yellow arms. ~750k installed.
- ABB
- Zürich. White arms. IRB lineage since 1974.
- KUKA
- Augsburg, Germany. Orange arms. KR series.
- > AXES : 6 (BASE/SHOULDER/ELBOW/WRIST×3)
- > REPEAT : ±0.02 mm
- > FLEET : ~3.5 M operational worldwide (2024)

### Slide 6: Sense. Plan. Act.

- 05 / CANONICAL LOOP
- Every robot, from a Roomba to Atlas, runs some version of this loop.
- The 1980s "subsumption architecture" debate was about whether you could
- skip the plan stage; modern systems blend reactive and deliberative layers.
- SENSE — cameras, LIDAR, IMU, force/torque, joint encoders.
- PLAN — state estimation, motion planning, task graphs.
- ACT — joint torques, end-effector commands, locomotion gaits.
- Loop frequency matters: 1 kHz at the joint, 30–200 Hz at perception,
- ~10 Hz at task. Latency is the hidden enemy.

### Slide 7: SLAM: build a map of a place you've never been.

- 06 / NAVIGATION
- Simultaneous Localization and Mapping. The chicken-and-egg problem at the
- heart of mobile robotics: to know where you are, you need a map; to make
- a map, you need to know where you are. SLAM solves both at once,
- probabilistically.
- EKF-SLAM (1990s) — extended Kalman filter, gaussian beliefs, doesn't scale.
- FastSLAM / GraphSLAM (2000s) — particle filters, pose graphs, loop closure.
- Visual SLAM — ORB-SLAM, DSO; cameras only, runs on a phone.
- NeRF / 3D Gaussian SLAM (2023+) — dense photoreal reconstruction in the loop.
- > KEY OPS : feature extract → data assoc → optimize pose graph → close loop
- > FAILURES : kidnapped robot, perceptual aliasing, dynamic scenes

### Slide 8: Boston Dynamics.

- 07 / DYNAMIC LOCOMOTION
- Spun out of MIT's Leg Lab in 1992 under Marc Raibert. They proved a robot
- could fall and not fall — that controlled instability beat statically
- stable plodding. The viral videos pulled the field forward by years.
- BigDog · 2005
- DARPA-funded gas-powered quadruped. Shoved on ice, recovers. The "do not anger it" video.
- Atlas · 2013→
- Hydraulic, then electric (2024). Backflips, parkour, picking parts on a mock factory floor.
- Spot · 2019
- First commercial product. Inspections at oil rigs, construction sites, hospitals. ~$75k.
- → search: boston dynamics atlas (YouTube)

### Slide 9: Manipulation is still hard.

- 08 / THE HARD PART
- ⚠ Unsolved
- Walking and driving are largely solved. Picking up a strawberry without
- crushing it, opening a ziplock bag, threading a cable — these remain
- open problems. The reasons are physical, not algorithmic.
- Contact dynamics — friction, deformation, slip. Hybrid systems are hard to plan through.
- Tactile sensing — GelSight, BioTac give rich signals; few hands have them at scale.
- Dexterity — the human hand has 27 DoF. Most robot hands have 4–16, with weak fingertips.
- Dataset gap — internet has billions of images but few demonstrations of contact.
- > HUMAN HAND : 27 DoF, ~17,000 mechanoreceptors
- > SHADOW HAND: 24 DoF, ~$100k+
- > GAP : not joint count — sensing + control bandwidth

### Slide 10: The humanoid wave.

- 09 / 2022 — ?
- A surge of well-funded entrants betting that human-shaped robots can
- drop into existing human environments — warehouses, homes, factories —
- without retooling.
- Tesla Optimus — vertically integrated, leveraging FSD stack.
- Figure — partnered with BMW, OpenAI ties, Bay Area.
- 1X (Norway) — NEO Beta soft-shell home humanoid.
- Apptronik — Apollo, Mercedes pilots.
- Unitree (China) — G1, H1; aggressive pricing under $20k.
- As of 2025: pilots in warehouses. Unit economics, MTBF, and safety
- certification are the gating questions, not motion.

### Slide 11: The AI brain.

- 10 / WHAT CHANGED
- 2022 → 2025
- For 50 years, robotics control was hand-engineered. The recent shift:
- large pretrained models — vision, language, and action — fine-tuned on
- robot data, generalize across tasks the way LLMs generalize across text.
- RT-1 / RT-2 (Google, 2022–23) — transformer policies on real robots.
- OpenVLA (2024) — open-source vision-language-action, 7B params, fine-tunable.
- π0 / π0.5 (Physical Intelligence, 2024–25) — flow-matching action heads.
- Gemini Robotics (2025) — multimodal foundation models targeting embodiment.
- > INPUT : RGB frames + language instruction
- > OUTPUT : end-effector pose / joint deltas @ 5–50 Hz
- > UNLOCK : zero-shot tasks, language-conditioned policies, sim-to-real transfer

### Slide 12: Where the money goes.

- 11 / DEPLOYMENT
- WAREHOUSES
- Amazon, Symbotic, Locus. Picking, sorting, end-of-line. Highest-volume near-term market.
- ELDERCARE
- Japan + Europe demographics. Lift assist, fall detection, social companions. Slow regulatory path.
- SURGERY
- Intuitive's da Vinci has done 14M+ procedures. Tele-operated, not autonomous — yet.
- AGRICULTURE
- Tractors steer themselves; weeders, pickers, dairy bots fill labor gaps.
- LOGISTICS
- Autonomous trucks, last-mile delivery rovers, sidewalk bots. Regulation-bound.
- DEFENSE
- Drones, ground vehicles, perimeter security. The fastest-deploying segment, and the one with the most ethical weight.

### Slide 13: References & further viewing.

- 12 / CLOSING
- A starter set. None are exhaustive; all are useful.
- Books — Siegwart & Nourbakhsh, Intro to Autonomous Mobile Robots; Murray, Li, Sastry, A Mathematical Introduction to Robotic Manipulation.
- Open source — ROS / ROS2, MoveIt, Drake, Isaac Sim, MuJoCo.
- Courses — Underactuated Robotics (Russ Tedrake, MIT); Modern Robotics (Kevin Lynch, Northwestern).
- Reports — IFR World Robotics annual; Robot Report.
- // VIDEO SEARCHES
- youtube → boston dynamics atlas
- youtube → industrial robotics unimate
- END OF DECK / 13 SLIDES / SAFETY: KEEP CLEAR


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