About

This site is a growing set of interactive tools for robotics. Every one is something you can drag, tune, or break until the underlying math stops being a wall of symbols.

Where the name comes from

George Devol filed a patent in December 1954 for something he called a Programmed Article Transfer. It was granted in 1961 as U.S. Patent 2,988,237, and by then the first machine built from it, the Unimate, was pulling hot die-cast parts out of a machine at a General Motors plant in Ewing Township, New Jersey. It was the first industrial robot.

Devol found his business partner, Joseph Engelberger, at a cocktail party. Between them the machine changed names twice: programmed article transfer, then manipulator, then robot. That last rename was a marketing decision. The word that founded an industry was chosen because it sold better.

Devol kept inventing for ninety-nine years. Naming a site after him seemed like reasonable company to keep.

Colophon

Built with Astro, rendered to static HTML, hosted on Cloudflare Pages. The math lives in a dependency-free module with its own test suite; the renderers are swappable on top of it. No advertising trackers and nothing that follows you between sites. The email form loads a script from Kit, who run the mailing list; it handles the signup and counts how many people subscribe. That script and aggregate page counts are the whole of it.