We, Robots: an exhibition on the history of robots

Yesterday we went to Espacio Fundación Telefónica to see the exhibition “We, Robots”. It’s a spectacular display of robots that starts from the dawn of robotics, explaining the most important milestones in its history, reaching the present and projecting some future scenarios. This journey is divided into five stops:

Ancestors

Probably the one that caught my attention the most because of the amount of data I didn’t know. For example, that the first automation was designed in 400 B.C. by Archytas of Tarentum, considered the father of mathematical mechanics; or this quote by Aristotle from 320 B.C. “If every tool, when ordered, or even of its own accord, could do the work that befits it… then there would be no need either of apprentices for the master workers or of slaves for the lords.” Other better known but equally fascinating facts were:

• 1495 — Da Vinci created the first humanoid robot, “The Mechanical Knight” (which could be seen in the exhibition), with remote control capability.
• 1738 — Jacques de Vaucanson created the first robotic pet in history: an automaton duck with digestive system.
• 1801 — Joseph Marie Jacquard invented the first mechanical loom
• 1912 — Leonardo Torres Quevedo invented the first automaton capable of playing chess: The Chess player.
• 1937 — Elektro was born, the first robot in history, two meters high, weighing 120 kg, who could walk by voice commands, say 700 words and smoke.

About us

A space where you can see a wide variety of robots, from Sony’s Aibo to Gaël Langevin’s InMoov (2012), the first open source humanoid that can be made at home using 3D printers. Something really interesting was the explanation of the types of robots that exist:

• By its application: there are industrial robots (collaborative robots that can work with humans, those that cannot work with humans and those that perform tasks not accessible to us); and service robots, focused on specific tasks such as medical, military, household tasks …
• By their shape: there are humanoids or anthropomorphs (android if it has the shape of a man, ginoid if it has the shape of a woman and geminoid if it looks like a specific person) and animaloids (with forms of animals or plantoids in the form of a plant or a living being).
• By their means of locomotion, connectivity and size: drones if they are aerial or aquatic; there are also land robots; swarms if they are distributed; microbots if they are very small or nanobots (smaller) for the manufacture of chips or to operate inside the human body; and modular if they are formed by smaller robots.

Emotions

Mutual empathy is essential for coexistence and collaboration between humans and robots. For them to serve humans correctly, some types of robots must know how to detect the moods and emotions of the former. We have to teach them to understand us. At this stop you can see a selection of more than 20 comics and toys (from 1940 to the present day) that show the changes in society’s acceptance of robots. Also, a video-installation with images of the most sophisticated humanoids of Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro. It mentions the Uncanny Valley, one of the great challenges to overcome.

Imagine

The dialogue between science and fiction is one of the most fertile in the history of humanity, the narrations with robotic protagonists have been feeding the flames of creativity of artists and scientists for millennia. In this section, a replica of ‘R2-D2′ of the Star Wars saga created in 1977 stands out. Also, a replica of the robot ‘T-800’, protagonist of the 1984 film Terminator.

At your service

Although humans must control their development, robots are there to make our lives easier and achieve things that we alone would not achieve. In addition to industrial robots, we currently live immersed in service robotics. Here you can see robots like the PackBot 510 (2007) by iRobot, the army and police robot for bomb disposal, which helped the rescue forces in the Fukushima catastrophe in Japan. As a final touch an open door was left to the cyborgs, merging life organisms with cybernetic elements.

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