ABSTRACT
Since the early 1960s and for more than three decades, the field of robotics mostly appeared as an automobile industry-dependent sector. A crucial point in this process occurred in the early 1980s, when Japanese industry first began to implement this technology on a large scale in their factories, acquiring strategic competitiveness by decreasing costs and increasing the quality of their products. Western car producers learned a hard lesson and followed Japanese thinking, installing robots in their factories a few years later. This trend expanded so much that, according to the World 2005 Robotics Report, the automotive industry in Europe still received around 60–70 per cent of all new robot installations in the period 1997–2003 (UN 2005: ix).
