Robot
Walter stressed the importance of using purely analogue electronics to simulate brain processes at a time when his contemporaries such as Alan Turing and John von Neumann were all turning towards a view of mental processes in terms of digital computation. His work inspired subsequent generations of robotics researchers such as Rodney Brooks, Hans Moravec and Mark Tilden. Modern incarnations of Walter's "turtles" may be found in the form of BEAM robotics.
The first digitally operated and programmable robot was invented by George Devol in 1954 and was ultimately called the Unimate. This ultimately laid the foundations of the modern robotics industry. Devol sold the first Unimate to General Motors in 1960, and it was installed in 1961 in a plant in Trenton, New Jersey to lift hot pieces of metal from a die casting machine and stack them. Devol's patent for the first digitally operated programmable robotic arm represents the foundation of the modern robotics industry.
Robots in literature
The first use of the word "Robot" was in Karel Čapek's play "R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)" written in 1920 and first performed in Czechoslovakia in 1921, in New York City in 1922 and an English edition published in 1923. Artificial living beings are created from a chemical substitute for protoplasm but over time they learn about violence from their human creators and begin to revolt. The play ends on an optimistic, even spiritual, note as the artificial biology leads a male and female robot to fall in love and inherit the earth.