50 Years of Robotics [From the Guest Editors]

In this issue, we celebrate the 50 years of robotics, following up on the theme from this year´s IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) held in Anchorage, Alaska. The exact beginning of robotics is difficult to pin down and the topic for future historians of our field. Humankind has a long fascination with machines built in our image. Such machines were mentioned by the ancient Greeks, described by Al-Jazari in the 13th century, and designed by Leonardo da Vinci in the 15th century. Human- and animal-like machines, automata, were a major fad in Europe in the 18th century with the flute player, the musician, the draughtsman, and the digesting duck. The term robot was coined in a 1920s play by Karel Čapek, and Isaac Asimov published his first robot story in 1940. A common theme was the creation or the depiction of a machine that could emulate a human.