IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - March 2015 - 137

History

Robotics Narratives and Networks
By Selma Sabanovic, Stasa Milojevic, Peter Asaro, and Matt Francisco

Somewhere around 1983, maybe late 1982, there was talk beginning about doing
something more formal within IEEE that dealt with robotics and automation.
Informally, activity was getting started through the Control Society,...also Systems, Man
and Cybernetics, which obviously makes a lot of sense with the telerobotics things and
a few others. But we wanted to build a more permanent home for it, so there was
one of the first meetings. George Saridis chaired the meeting. I know George Bekey
was there, Tony Bejczy, Lou Paul, probably another half dozen people.
And it was decided to form a council within IEEE...We formed a council in robotics
and automation...George Bekey started the transactions. At that time it was called
a journal...It was the IEEE Journal on Robotics and Automation...We started the
conferences, the ICRA conference, it started in 1983. The first one was in Atlanta and
we participated every year...Once the conference got started there was a great deal of
interest. And there were a growing number of papers being submitted every year and
rather than having four or five societies trying to compete with each other on all these
things, it seemed to make more sense to have a single organization that would be
responsible for it.
-Interview with Richard Volz, May 2012

his is how Richard (Dick)
A. Volz, the president of the
IEEE Robotics and Automation
Society (RAS) in 2006 and 2007,
describes the founding of the Society and
the early days of robotics as a field of scientific study and technological development, a community of practitioners
united by a common problem. This, of
course, is not the only origin story of the
robotics community. In an interview on
18 November 2010, Bernie Roth describes the founding of RoManSy, the
first international symposium dedicated
specifically to work in robotics, with his
friend Aron E. Kobrinsky in 1973.
The conference brought together
robotics researchers from all over the
world, beginning particularly with those
from the west and eastern Europe,
enabling an exchange of knowledge and
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2014.2385564
Date of publication: 13 March 2015

people. Roth remembers meeting a
young Oussama Khatib at one of the
RoManSy conferences; even though
Khatib could not speak English then, the
meeting gave him the opportunity to get
a postdoctoral position at Stanford University. Khatib's own recollections see the
creation of other opportunities for the
community to gather:
Later on, in probably the early
1980s, one of the other early
meetings in robotics was called
International Symposium of
Robotic Research. That was sort
of a small meeting that brought
all the experts in robotics at the
time to meet and discuss the different aspects of robotics from
vision to planning, to control, to
design, all these different aspects
in one meeting.
However, the community as a
whole comes together in one
meeting as we know, and this is

ICRA or the IEEE/Robotics Society of Japan International Conference on Intelligent Robots and
Systems (IROS). So, at ICRA and
IROS all the researchers in robotics and related fields are interested in coming to meet with
other researchers to find out
about the state of the research but
also to interact and especially for
Ph.D. students, newcomers to the
field [1].
These memories speak of friendships, networking, collaborations, institutionalization, and the cultivation of a
group identity for robotics researchers.
Despite its relatively recent origins in
the second half of the 20th century,
today, robotics is a mature scientific field,
making the centuries-long dream of creating autonomous, intelligent machines
an increasingly commonplace reality. Its
history is long enough that the early participants in the field are no longer all
with us. In 2011, in recognition of 50
years of research and development in robotics, the RAS funded a project to
collect and analyze information about
the rise of robotics as a field of study and
its later growth as a community of practice and interdisciplinary problem space.
The project involves the collection of oral
history interviews with individuals from
industry, academia, and other institutions who have done pioneering work in
robotics. In addition to the interviews,
we have also been analyzing robotics-related publications to show the general,
social, and intellectual developments in
the field over time. The interview videos
and transcripts collected during the

MARCH 2015

IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

137

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