History
Related papers: 20
About
History, as a category in robotics and AI research, refers to the body of foundational texts, intellectual lineages, and contextual narratives that trace how intelligent machines, autonomous systems, and computational thinking have developed over time. It encompasses technical milestones — such as early legged robots, mobile platforms, and surgical systems — alongside broader social, political, and philosophical forces that shaped their emergence. In robotics and AI, historical context matters because the field draws heavily on prior paradigms: behaviorist approaches challenged classical AI assumptions, military funding shaped autonomy research, and cultural attitudes influenced human-robot interaction design. Understanding this lineage helps engineers and researchers recognize why certain architectures, assumptions, or ethical blind spots persist in current systems. History matters because it prevents practitioners from reinventing solutions to solved problems, reveals how societal values become embedded in technical choices, and clarifies the consequences — economic, environmental, and ethical — of deploying intelligent systems at scale. A historically informed engineer is better equipped to anticipate trajectories, critically evaluate dominant assumptions, and design technology that serves broad human needs rather than narrow institutional ones.
Top Researchers
Top Institutes
Top Cited Papers
Legged Robots That Balance
Marc H. Raibert, Ernest R. Tello
Citations: 2724 • 1986
Being there: putting brain, body, and world together again
Citations: 2658 • 1997
Introduction to autonomous mobile robots
Citations: 2194 • 2011
Speculative everything: design, fiction, and social dreaming
Citations: 1983 • 2014
The Closed World
Paul N. Edwards
Citations: 956 • 1996
Frontier-based exploration using multiple robots
Brian Yamauchi
Citations: 709 • 1998
Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century
Citations: 679 • 2010
Preparing for the Twenty-First Century.
Walter L. Goldfrank, Paul Kennedy
Citations: 627 • 1994
Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence
Kate Crawford
Citations: 580 • 2022
Rise of the robots: technology and the threat of a jobless future
Citations: 579 • 2015
Living With Seal Robots—Its Sociopsychological and Physiological Influences on the Elderly at a Care House
K. Wada, Takanori Shibata
Citations: 572 • 2007
Killer Robots
Robert Sparrow
Citations: 550 • 2007
Global Warming: Energy, Environmental Pollution, and the Impact of Power Electronics
B.K. Bose
Citations: 530 • 2010
Cambrian intelligence: the early history of the new AI
Citations: 514 • 2000
Time and the Other
Claus Schreiner, Emmanuel Lévinas, Richard I. Cohen
Citations: 462 • 1987
Kinodynamic motion planning
Bruce R. Donald, Patrick Xavier, John Canny, John H. Reif
Citations: 456 • 1993
Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Citations: 448 • 2019
AI: the tumultuous history of the search for artificial intelligence
Citations: 427 • 1993
Trouble in the Making?: The Future of Manufacturing-Led Development
Mary Hallward‐Driemeier, Gaurav Nayyar
Citations: 409 • 2017
Deep Learning in Natural Language Processing
Li Deng, Yang Liu
Citations: 386 • 2018