George Devol

Devol's patent for 'Programmed Article Transfer' introduced the programmable robot arm, the ancestor of the robotic pickers and palletizers now entering warehouses. His machine could store a sequence of commands and repeat them, so one device could be reprogrammed for different tasks. With Joseph Engelberger he formed Unimation, and the first Unimate began handling hot die-cast parts at a General Motors plant in 1961. Today's robotic piece-picking, case palletizing, and collaborative robots build on the same idea of a reprogrammable arm doing repetitive material handling.

• Robotic Piece PickingRobot arm that picks single items
• Collaborative RobotCobotRobot that works safely next to people

• Joseph Engelberger1925–2015 · Father of robotics, Unimation founder
• Victor Scheinman1942–2016 · Inventor of the Stanford Arm

• First Unimate Industrial Robot at General Motors1961 · A robot arm goes to work on a GM production line

1. George Devol: A Life Devoted to Invention, and Robots (IEEE Spectrum) spectrum.ieee.org
2. George Devol (Wikipedia) en.wikipedia.org