Do You Recognize These Robots?

Oct. 13, 2022

Can you identify these robots from a small image clip?

This is part of the Do You Recognize This series in the Electronic History section of our Series Library and in the TechXchange: ROS: Robot Operating System

What you’ll learn:

What were some of the more interesting robots of the past?
Why these robots were influential.

Robots have fascinated engineers and the public, showing up in all sorts of movies and books from Asimov’s I, Robot to Wall-E. We’re not quite to the point of Asimov’s three laws of robotics for positronic brains, but these days machine learning and artificial intelligence have progressed significantly to make fully autonomous robots practical for some applications.

In this gallery, we take a look at real robots that have impacted the electronics industry. This isn’t an exhaustive list, which would include hundreds of slides. Instead, we cherry-pick some robots we’ve encountered along the way. See if you can recognize these from the hints.

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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Check out my blog, AltEmbedded on Electronic Design, as well as his latest articles on this site that are listed below.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.