Robotics research really began in the 1960’s at MIT but it wasn’t until the late 1970’s that robotic applications arising from this research became industrially profitable. These robots were built to aid automobile manufacturers in spray painting and spot welding applications. (Albus, 1990)

Industrial robotic development proceeded rapidly up until the mid-1980’s when it levelled off in 1986 and showed decline in 1987. The reason usually given for this failure is a mixture of over optimism (in relation to the nature of progress of robotic development) and unanticipated difficulties which arose when research was conducted in robotic applications outside of the traditional realms of spot welding and spray painting (areas such as assembly and applications which required a lot of different sensors and high levels of AI). Although the problems encountered at this point caused financial investment in robotics to reduce considerably, researchers in the field continued to show inroads in solving the problems at hand, albeit often at a slow pace.