Abstract
Robots, with different definitions and unfinished scope, have substantially influenced our lives. As is by now well known, the term “robot” was initiated in Karel Capek’s 1921 play Rossum’s Universal Robots (RUR), and the concept quickly found its way into the popular imagination, becoming the subject of various dramas, books, and movies. The term “robotics” and the famous three laws of robotics were first introduced in Isaac Asimov’s science fiction. Real robots could be said to date from a collaboration between inventor George Devol and entrepreneur Joseph Engelberger in 1956 which established Unimation–the first company started robot business which characterizes the birth of robot-centered flexible automation.
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© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Zhu, WH. (2010). Introduction. In: Virtual Decomposition Control. Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics, vol 60. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10724-5_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10724-5_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-10723-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-10724-5
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