The survey questioned 1,000 workers in each of five countries: U.S., China, Japan, U.K. and Germany. Across the board, workers are embracing robots.

Forty-seven years ago, two men who would launch the industrial-robotics revolution met over cocktails to discuss the ideas of the science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov. Joseph F. Engelberger and George ...

Do you know the name [George Devol]? Probably not. In 1961 he received a patent for “Programmed Article Transfer.” We’d call his invention the first robot arm, and its name was the Unimate. Unlike ...

Born from a chance encounter between a robotics tinkerer and an Isaac Asimov-inspired engineer-turned-entrepreneur, the Unimate—a single-armed, vacuum tube-driven robot—was put to work on the assembly ...