Robotics : the foundations of a discipline

The word "robot" appeared early in the last century, and has since fed the collective imagination. Unimate, the first industrial robot, appeared in 1961 on the assembly lines of General Motors. Today, manufacturing robotics is well established, and has considerably renewed the organization of production resources. 50 years after Unimate, the Technological Innovation Liliane Bettencourt Chair is dedicated to robotics: the aim is to give an account of 50 years of research, initially dominated by the design of numerically-controlled machines, accompanied by rapid technological progress in computing (power and miniaturization), contributing to the emergence of disciplinary fields such as automatic control and signal processing, borrowing from computer science, stimulated by vast fields of application that go beyond the confines of industrial production, crowned by some fine successes, nourishing old dreams. From this abundance of ideas and possibilities emerges a questioning of the relationship between the machine and the real world. It is this questioning that will be the focus of the associated lectures and seminars.