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• 1973: Ichiro Kato at Tokyo’s Waseda University developed
WABOT-1, the first full-scale anthropomorphic robot. The

WABOT-1 was able to communicate with a person in Japanese
and measure distances and directions to the objects.

THE GROWTH YEARS (1980-1987) Ichiro Kato
In the 1980s, the AI paradigm shifted to symbolic AI and the so-called expert systems

or knowledge-based systems. The underlying concept was to convert human expert
knowledge in form of computer code and distribute it as a program to a large number
of personal computers (PCs). LISP and PROLOG were the main symbolic programming
languages.

Some key achievements of this period are:
• 1980: The robot musician WABOT-2 can converse with

a person, read a normal musical score with its eye
(camera) and play tunes of average difficulty on an
electronic organ. The WABOT-2 was the first milestone
in developing a personal robot.

• 1983: ID3, an algorithm that generates a decision tree
from a given set of data, is created. ID3 is the precursor
to the C4.5 algorithm used in machine learning and

natural language processing.
WABOT-2
THE MATURATION YEARS (1993-2011)
In the 1990s and 2010s, AI addressed complex problems, providing solutions that were

found to be useful in different applications. AI researchers began to develop and use
more sophisticated mathematical tools.
• 1995: Kismet, a robot head, was created by Dr.

Cynthia Breazeal at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology as an experiment in affective
computing. Kismet could recognise and simulate
emotions. Kismet

• 1997: IBM Deep Blue beat the world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, and became
the first computer to beat a world chess champion.

• 2000: Honda developed ASIMO (Advanced Step in Innovative
Mobility), a humanoid robot with the ability to recognise moving
objects, postures, gestures, its surrounding environment, sounds,
and faces. ASIMO interpreted voice commands and human gestures,

and identified its companions. ASIMO

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