Unimate

Unimate was the first industrial robot,[1] which worked on a General Motors assembly line at the Inland Fisher Guide Plant in Ewing Township, New Jersey, in 1961.

[8] The machine weighed 4000 pounds[9] and undertook the job of transporting die castings from an assembly line and welding these parts on auto bodies, a dangerous task for workers, who might be poisoned by toxic fumes or lose a limb if they were not careful.

The patent proposed a cost-effective, general-purpose article-handling machine for diverse industrial tasks, with programmable motions, including gripping mechanisms.

[8] The position-sensing system (proprioception) had two versions: one using notched metal strips and ferrous material detection, the other, a magnetized plate with polarity-based sensing and recording.

[8] The fixed encoder array on the base unit served as a location index for recording, enabling deceleration near programmed positions and self-correction during operation.