Everything here is free to read, and nothing asks you to sign in. This page explains what the archive holds, the four ways into it, and what you may do with what you find.
Ways in
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Search everything at once
The search box covers every kind of record in the archive — interviews, people, media, documents — in one query. Start with a name if you have one; robotics researchers are indexed by the spelling used in their own institutions.
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Search inside the transcripts
Every interview carries a full transcript, and transcript search is a separate tool that looks only at what people actually said. This is the way to find a laboratory, a machine or a turn of phrase that appears nowhere in a title or a summary.
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Browse by topic, era, place or application
If you do not have a name to start from, come at it sideways. The same records are filed under research topics, decades, countries and application areas, so you can begin with “manipulation in the 1980s” or “robotics in Japan” and follow it outward.
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Read the field as a map
The project analyses the robotics literature as a network of publications, authors and institutions. The visualizations are interactive: pan, zoom, and click a cluster to see which research communities it holds and how they connect.
Open the Atlas
What the archive holds
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157
Oral history interviews
Recorded with robotics researchers since 2010, at conferences and on site visits. Each one pairs the recording with a transcript and links out to the people, topics and places it touches.
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155
People
A profile for each researcher documented by the archive, gathering their interview, portrait, affiliations and related material in one place.
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607
Media files
Photographs, audio, video clips and scanned material, filterable by kind and by the same topics and eras used everywhere else on the site.
Reading an interview
The recording and the transcript are the same document
Play the interview if you want the voice; read the transcript if you want to search, quote or skim. Long interviews are worth reading first and watching second — the transcript is where the detail is easiest to find.
Follow the links out
Interviews are connected to the people, topics, eras and places they mention. The chips under an interview are live filters: each one takes you to everything else in the archive filed the same way.
Interviews are primary sources
These are recollections, given years after the events they describe. They are invaluable and they are also fallible — dates and attributions are worth checking against the published record before you rely on them.
Using what you find
Citing the archive
Cite an interview by the name of the person interviewed, the interview date, and the page address you read it at, crediting the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society History Project. Quotations should follow the transcript.
Reuse and permissions
Quoting and linking for research and teaching is welcome. Photographs and recordings carry their own rights, which are not always the project's to grant — ask before republishing one.
Corrections and additions
If something here is wrong, incomplete, or missing a person who should be in it, please tell us. Corrections from the people who were there are how this archive improves.