Factories once employed toolmakers who hand-built custom metal jigs and fixtures to hold every part in exact position for assembly, since neither a human nor an early machine could reliably locate a part on its own. Vision-guided robotic grippers, widespread by the 1980s, let robots find and grasp parts directly, and the bespoke fixture-building trade shrank into a specialty rather than a factory-wide necessity.
Jig-and-fixture maker已不复存在。这里整理是什么消灭了它，以及哪个职业接手了那份工作。
1920–1960
Robots on paper, in fiction and in patents
For four decades, 'robot' existed mostly as an idea. Karel Čapek's 1921 play imagined manufactured workers rebelling against their makers; Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, introduced in his 1942 story 'Runaround,' gave the fictional idea an ethical framework decades before any machine needed one. The real engineering groundwork was quieter: numerically controlled machine tools in the early 1950s proved a machine could follow a stored program instead of a human operator's hand, and George Devol's 1954 patent for a reprogrammable mechanical arm turned that idea toward general-purpose manipulation for the first time.
当时还发生了什么
1921
Čapek's R.U.R. coins 'robot'
Karel Čapek's play Rossum's Universal Robots premieres in Prague on January 25, 1921, introducing the word 'robot' — coined by his brother, painter Josef Čapek — from the Czech 'robota,' meaning forced labor.
1954
Devol patents the programmable manipulator
George Devol files a patent for 'Programmed Article Transfer,' describing a reprogrammable robotic arm controlled by stored instructions — the concept behind Unimate, granted in 1961.
1961
Unimate goes to work at General Motors
The first Unimate, built by Devol and Joseph Engelberger's company Unimation, is installed at a GM die-casting plant in New Jersey, lifting and stacking hot metal parts — the first industrial robot on a production line.
1969
The Stanford Arm is built for computer control
Victor Scheinman designs the Stanford Arm at Stanford University's AI Lab, the first robot arm built specifically for computer control rather than adapted from industrial machinery.
那份工作如今在哪里
Designs the machines that sense, decide and act in the physical world, where the hard problem was never intelligence but the world itself.
🦾 Robotics Engineer →