History of Robots from ancient Egypt to current times

David Grossman
IBM Research, Retired

An irreverent non-technical review of the history of surprisingly animate machines, from ancient Egypt to current times. Areas include teleoperators for hazardous environments, assembly systems, medical applications, entertainment, and science fiction. The talk covers such varied topics as Memnon son of Dawn, Droz's automata, Vaucanson's duck, cathedral clocks, Von Kempelen's chess player, household robots, Asimov's laws, Disneyland, dinosaurs, and movie droids and cyborgs.

Slides:

There is no downloadable version of the slides for this talk available at this time.

Videos:

• Join the live presentation. Wednesday November 5, 4:15-5:30.  Requires Microsoft Windows Media player.
• View video by lecture sequence. Fall 2014 only, HTML5. Available after 8PM on the days of the lecture.
• View Video on YouTube.

About the speaker:

Dave Grossman has a PhD in Physics from Harvard and taught at Princeton. He spent 25 years at IBM, in research and management in AI and robotics. An IEEE Fellow for contributions to robotics, he co-invented using software to calibrate robots and pioneered robot assembly of electronic cards, 2-arm robots with collision avoidance, and 3D solid modeling. He also worked on RoboDoc hip surgery and laparoscopic robotics. After IBM, he worked at USC, co-founded a silicon valley startup, and worked at Stanford on modeling the human cardiovascular system. For a few years he was a tourguide at SLAC. He has published 60 technical papers and lectured frequently on the History of Robots.

Contact information:

David Grossman