Mechanical arm
Other robotic arms were invented in 1961 by Unimate, evolving to the PUMA arm. In 1963, the Rancho arm was designed, along with many others in the future. Even though Joseph Engelberger marketed Unimate, George Devol invented the robotic arm. It focused on using Unimate for tasks that are harmful to humans. In 1959, a 2700 pound Unimate prototype was installed at the General Motors die-casting plant in Trenton, New Jersey. The Unimate 1900 series became the very first produced robotic arm for die-casting. During a very short period of time, it had produced at least 450 robotic arms were being used. It still remains one of the most significant contributions in the last one hundred years. As years went by, technology seemed to evolve, helping to build better robotic arms. Not only companies invented different robotic arms, but so did colleges. In 1969, Victor Scheinman from Stanford University invented the Stanford arm, where it had electronically powered arms that could move through six axes. Marvin Minsky, from MIT, built a robotic arm for the office of Naval Research, possibly for underwater explorations. This arm had twelve single degree freedom joints in this electric- hydraulic- high dexterity arm. Robots were initially created to perform a series of tasks that humans found boring, harmful, and tedious.
Robot
The first reference in Western literature to mechanical servants appears in Homer's "Iliad". In Book XVIII, Hephaestus, god of fire, creates new armor for the hero Achilles, assisted by robots. According to the Rieu translation, "Golden maidservants hastened to help their master. They looked like real women and could not only speak and use their limbs but were endowed with intelligence and trained in handwork by the immortal gods." The words "robot" or "android" are not used to describe them, but they are nevertheless mechanical devices human in appearance. "The first use of the word Robot was in Karel Čapek's play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) (written in 1920)". Writer Karel Čapek was born in Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic).