Unimation

A company built around a robot

Unimation, Inc. of Danbury, Connecticut, built the first Unimate robot^[1]. The Henry Ford museum names George C. Devol and Joseph F. Engelberger as the creators of that first Unimate^[1]. The company's identity and its machine are hard to separate: Unimate is the name of the robot, and Unimation is the name of the firm that made it.

Where it came from

Devol and Engelberger founded the company in Connecticut in 1961^[2]. Their partnership paired two different kinds of work. Devol was the inventor of the robot arm; Engelberger was the businessman who secured funding and pushed the machine toward the market^[2]. A working design alone would not have made a company, and money alone would not have produced a robot arm — Unimation was set up on the combination of the two.

The 1961 debut

In the same year the company was founded, Unimation first presented the Unimate 1900 series to the public at a trade show in Chicago^[2]. A trade show debut is a particular kind of introduction: the machine is shown to people who buy equipment for factories and plants rather than to a general audience. The 1900 series was the version of the robot that the public and the industry first saw under the Unimation name.

A robot on television

The most widely seen Unimation demonstration came five years later. In 1966, Engelberger appeared with a Unimate robot on The Tonight Show, hosted by Johnny Carson^[2]. On that programme the robot putted a golf ball, poured beer and conducted a band^[2]. Those three actions have little to do with factory work, and that was the point of showing them: a machine that could swing a putter, fill a glass or wave a baton in time was being presented as something more than a piece of plant equipment, and it reached an audience that would never visit a trade show in Chicago.

The PUMA series

Unimation did not stay with its first product line. Its later PUMA series was an all-electric, multi-CPU robot, with its own VAL language and force and vision sensors^[3]. Each of those features marks a step away from the earliest Unimates. An all-electric design and multiple processors mean the control of the machine is handled electronically and in software. A dedicated programming language, VAL, means the robot is instructed in a notation built for it rather than being wired to repeat a single motion. Force and vision sensors mean the machine can take in information about what it is touching and seeing while it works.

What the company represents

Unimation is remembered chiefly through the two things attached to its name in museum records and in accounts of the period: the first Unimate robot, which the Henry Ford museum credits to Devol and Engelberger as its creators^[1], and the PUMA line that followed^[3]. Between them lies the shift from a machine demonstrated at a trade fair and on a television stage to a programmable, sensor-equipped industrial product. The company is therefore a useful marker of when the robot arm moved from an inventor's idea into a business that built, sold and then kept redesigning it.