Planning and Decision-Making

Sixty Years of Replaying Recordings

In 1961, a hydraulic arm named Unimate picked up a die-cast metal part at a General Motors plant in Trenton, New Jersey. It was the first industrial robot deployed in production, and its control system was a magnetic drum that stored a sequence of joint positions. The robot did not think. It replayed a recording.

A human operator had physically guided the arm through the desired motion. The drum memorized the joint angles at each point, and the arm repeated that exact sequence thousands of times per shift.