History

Robotics is where the other courses become physical: AI serves as its brain, data and the cloud as its nervous system, cybersecurity as its immune system.

The dream of the living machine is old. In 1738, Jacques de Vaucanson presented his automaton duck. In 1801, Jacquard's loom, programmed with punched cards, mechanised a complex human gesture: the same punched card that would found computing.

The automaton fascinates, but it replays a fixed program: it lacks perception, decision-making and adaptation to the world.

The word robot was born in the theatre, in Karel Čapek's R.U.R. (1920), from robota, forced labour. From the very beginning, the robot carried two contradictory promises: freeing us from work, or stirring fear of a machine revolt.

In 1942, Isaac Asimov formulated his "Three Laws of Robotics": pure fiction, but a lasting cultural template for ethical reflection.

The first industrial robot, Unimate, entered a General Motors factory in 1961 to handle red-hot parts. Japan then seized on the idea: FANUC, Yaskawa and Kawasaki made the archipelago the kingdom of industrial robots.

In parallel, research explored mobile robotics: Shakey (SRI, 1966-1972) was the first robot able to reason about its actions, already at the crossroads of robotics and AI.

For three decades, the real-world robot was an arm in a cage: fast, precise, blind, separated from humans. Around this industrial core emerged ASIMO, AIBO, the Roomba, NASA's Mars rovers and the da Vinci surgical robot.

The DARPA Grand Challenge launched the race for the autonomous vehicle. The DARPA Robotics Challenge pushed humanoids forward, while showing their fragility. In between, Amazon bought Kiva Systems and triggered the quiet revolution of robotic logistics.

Deep learning met mechanics: Boston Dynamics' Atlas impressed, Google DeepMind showed with RT-2 that a vision-language model can control a robot, and VLA (vision-language-action) models applied the LLM recipe to physical movement.

The humanoid wave is accelerating: Figure, Tesla Optimus, Unitree, Agility, Apptronik, 1X. In France, Wandercraft unveiled Calvin with Renault, while Pollen Robotics and Hugging Face lead the open-source path with Reachy and LeRobot.