From the smart hands to tele-operations

Professor Dr. Antal K. Bejczy, the Hungarian-born scientist innovator worked for the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California from 1969, where he developed, with his colleagues, the first dynamic model of robotic manipulators based on the Lagrangian formulation. In the field of teleoperation, he developed, and sponsored through NASA Telerobotics program, a number of prototypes aimed at achieving full Telepresence in space and undersea. He pioneered robot dynamics development and published one of the first papers in this field, describing "smart hands" with multi-fingered, effector equipped sensors. One of his research papers named "The Robot Arm Dynamics and Control" was published by JPL in 1974. This was one of the most important papers in the history of robotics.