Joseph Engelberger
Joseph Engelberger was an American engineer and entrepreneur, often called the father of robotics, who founded Unimation and commercialized the Unimate industrial robot with George Devol.
What they did and why it matters
Engelberger turned the robot from an invention into a business, which is the step warehouse automation is still working through today. Unimation, founded in 1956, put the first Unimate to work at General Motors in 1961, and Engelberger spent years persuading manufacturers that robots could pay for themselves. He later founded HelpMate Robotics, whose courier robots navigated hospitals, an early form of autonomous mobile robot. Fulfillment operators weighing robotics today face the same questions he did about reliability, payback period, and which tasks to automate first.