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Foundations of Robotics
This chapter is an extensive overview of the history of automata and robotics from
the Hellenistic period, which saw the birth of science and technology, and during
which lived the founders of modern engineering, to today. Contemporary robotics
is actually a very young field. It was preceded by a 2000-years period in which
highly sophisticated automata were built for very different purposes—to entertain, to
impress or to amaze—at different times. You will see that the methods and techniques
that were used to build these automata, and that largely contributed to the development of robotics, were at times imported from unexpected fields—astronomy, music,
weaving, jewellery; and that the impulse that drove automata makers to build their
artificial beings was far from rational, but rather rooted in the age-old mythical desire
to simulate, and even to realize, an entity from inert materials
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