Robots have moved from factory floors into hospitals, laboratories, farms, disaster zones, space exploration, and everyday life. Their history, however, is not only a story of machines. It is also a story of people improvising with scarce equipment, exchanging ideas across disciplines and national borders, and gradually building a new scientific community.
The IEEE Robotics and Automation Society History Project began recording oral history interviews with robotics researchers in 2010 at related conferences and through site visits to institutions. These interviews document how the field developed from the perspective of the people who built it: how they entered robotics from other disciplines, what problems they chose to pursue and why, and how its laboratories, companies, conferences, and professional institutions took shape.
The interviews preserve details that often appear nowhere in the published record: a young researcher borrowing a manipulator and racing to complete a robot hand with a computer loaned for only six months; a graduate student becoming involved in early robotics “by osmosis”; and small international meetings where researchers in vision, planning, control, and design began to recognize themselves as part of a shared field.
Through oral history, archival research, and bibliographic and network analysis, the project connects these personal experiences with broader developments in science, technology, and society. The archive is intended for roboticists, historians and other scholars, students, educators, and members of the public who are curious about how robotics came to be and how its past continues to shape its future.
The project is a collaboration of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society and Indiana University Bloomington, with archival support from the IEEE History Center. It depends most of all on the interviewees who generously volunteered their time and shared their experiences.