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1957 – "Mr. Fantastic" Ushering Robot by Andy Frain Jr..

A tape recorder replays the ushering commentary via a speaker in 'his' chest. 'His' right toe has a sensor that counts the passing crowd.

An interesting anecdote about Andy Frain, Jr.

Source: The San Bernardino County, May 21 1954.

Runs $1 Million Firm
His Pay: $15 a Week
Chicago (UP) – Andy Frain, Jr., 20, who is running the family's million-dollar ushering business during his father's illness, makes more money at it than rumored.
Asked to comment on reports his allowance was only $10 a week he replied: "Actually, it's about $15."

1974 Japanese Sci-Fi image of a Space Tug by Shigeru Komatsuzaki. Whilst it looks aggressive and attacking, it appears to be a rescue vehicle.

Space Tugs by Sokolov and Leonov c1965.

A depiction of an Unmanned Orbital Free-Flyer, similar to the 1982-4 Telepresence Servicer Unit (TSU) concept. Image source: projectrho.com

Detail: Image source: projectrho.com

Artwork by Don Davis for “Icarus Descending” (1973). In the story the tug is delivering a large nuclear device (helpfully labled “DANGER”) in order to divert the asteroid Icarus from a collision with Terra.

Space pod from the anime Macross. Image source: projectrho.com

United Galaxy Sanitation Patrol cruiser from the TV series Quark, 1977.

Image by Robert McCall.

Space 5, Sci-fi anthology by Richard Davis, 1979.

Image similar to 1958 Lockheed Astrotug.

Image from some NASA document.

The manipulator arms are just grapplers in this concept. Image from Getty Images.

A Lunar lander, probably in a lunar orbit, using an extendible arm to transfer a disable astronaut in space. Concept by Grumman.

Manned Space pods similar to the 1978 Manned Remote Work Station (MRWS) by Grumman.

One-man rocket propulsion device with manipulator arms to hold cargo. From the youth nonfiction 1961 book, “What Does An Astronaut Do?” by Robert Wells.

Pilgrim-1 is a model kit. Pictured is the One-Man EVA craft (OMEVAC), also called Astrotug or “Little Toot”. Image source: via projectrho.com

Illustration from the children’s book “Space Flight The Coming Exploration of the Universe”, published by Golden Press, New York, 1959.

1957 Lion Annual cover. Now that’s a Space Robot.

See other early Space Teleoperators here.

See other early Lunar and Space Robots here.

The console of HECK with the floor cleaner being activated.

Mechanix Illustrated, Nov, 1959

HOW RCA IS PLANNING…. YOUR WORLD OF TOMORROW
By James C. G. Conniff [edited version – see full text here.]

An automated house with electronic devices that awaken you in the morning, make your bed, prepare your breakfast, clean house and make it burglar-proof while you are out.
All of these electronic miracles are in existence. They are products of the David Sarnoff Research Center in Princeton, N. J., and scientists of the Radio Corporation of America are working today to make them available to you tomorrow.
Let’s examine the automated house and its amazing Home Electronic Center, which consists of a miniaturized system of all-electronic mechanisms already lab-tested at Princeton. This system will let your wife run her home by push-buttons in a few short years. For example, with this Home Electronic Center setup your wife will dial the electronic controls the night before to wake you gently to music in the morning. The system will shut the window when you get up or turn up the heat or air conditioning. ….
RCA engineers call this wonder system the Home Electronic Center Kid, or HECK. While your wife snoozes on, silent HECK is busy preparing your breakfast—chilled juice, hot coffee, eggs and toast—which will be served by HECK as you approach the kitchen table.
You eat in a room suffused with electronic sunshine, even in the coldest weather. A tilt-up, table-top Telefax reports world news in text and pictures while HECK clears the outside walks of snow via buried heat grids. An electronically-activated servo mechanism opens the garage doors and warms up the car.
When your wife finally gets up, HECK has already done your dishes and tidied up and will do the same for her. While she enjoys a breakfast, HECK silently sorts and washes the laundry, dries it and folds it before dusting the house by electronic precipitation.
HECK will make the beds and quietly dispose of all garbage via machinery and deep underground tanks. All your wife has to do, besides keeping pantry and freezer loaded, is insert punched menu cards to have HECK come up with a simple snack or an elaborate dinner at a pre-set time. An ingenious delayed-transmission unit stores current to run this automatic household for 24 hours in case of power failure.
HECK will record telephone messages while you’re out and turn up the electroluminescent panel-lighting to welcome you home after dark. A simple but thief-proof key-and-IBM-card arrangement permits HECK to receive goods and pay de-liverymen by check during your absence. HECK will instantly signal for police if burglars try to break in when you are out or sound an alarm in case of fire.
A mobile radio-controlled unit to trim grass and hedges, powered by wafer-thin atomic batteries and responsive to HECK’s command, is also planned for this dream house.
…
These are just some of the electronic miracles that you will live to see. They are in the labs today. They will be in your home tomorrow.

Donald G. Moore's patent diagram correlates with the layout in the above images.

Patent info: Perambulating kitchen appliances and control means therefor by Donald G. Moore.

See the full patent here.

Patent number: 3010129
Filing date: Nov 4, 1957
Issue date: Nov 28, 1961

Donald G. Moore's patent included a travelling dishwasher as well.

See other early remote-controlled and robotic vacuum cleaners and floor scrubbers here.

Akira Kanayama’s painting machine from 1957 was a four-wheeled device that Kanayama could remote-control to create paintings approximately 180 by 280 cm. The canvas lay on the floor and the machine dripped and poured paint on the picture pane.

The painting machine is an early example of the machine/robot in the role of artist. Kanayama’s remote-controlled painting machine mimics Jackson Pollock’s drips painting –a technique he developed in the 1940’ties.

At the same time the machine follows Pollock’s ideas of automation and physical detachment between artist and painting, bringing it to a new level, but at the same time it makes fun of role of the artist – no longer an inspired and gesturing artist, but a homemade machine spilling paint. [See comments about Pollock by Dr. Prof. Machiko Kusahara below.]

Text and Pic Source: Electrifying Painting, Ming Tiampo

Kanayama began making his Machine Drawings (fig. 24) in 1957, which were a critique of automatism and the value it placed on self-expression through gestural painting. Kanayama’s Machine Drawings were made by attaching a can of quick-drying paint to an automatic toy car that created paintings whether or not the artist was even in the room…… Both Kanayama and Tanaka used technology as a markmaking instrument. By using a vocabulary of form that had technological rather than psychological origins, Kanayama and Tanaka launched a conceptual attack on the Informel and Abstract Expressionist idea that art could or should be an expression of the soul, poured out and worked on a canvas.

Kanayama hanging his painting done with a remote control mechanical car on vinyl (1957). See Note at bottom.

Source: The Avant-Garde in Exhibition, Altshuler 1994. Photograph – Sinichiro Osaki, Hyogo Prefecture Museum of Modern Art, Kobe, Kyoto Municipal Museum, 1957.

Akira Kanayama was the secretary of the Gutai group. He jokingly said that the position involved so much work that he had no time to paint and instead let a remote-controlled toy car paint for him. The resulting Work (1957) can be seen as a critique against Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, with which they have some resemblance. In Kanayama, the male genius who expresses his feelings with paint is supplanted by a toy car that randomly zooms around the paper, leaving a trail of paint. Kanayama thus challenged the artist's personal relevance to the quality and ingenuity of the work.

Group photo: Yamazaki, Shiraga, Shimamoto, Murakami, Kanayama, Motonaga,
Tanaka, Ukita.

Pic Source: here.

Both Tanaka (1932 – 2005) and Kanayama (1924 – 2006), two of Japan’s best-known artists, were members of the Gutai Bijutsu Kyokai (Gutai Art Association), an avant-garde art group founded in 1954 in Osaka with the mission to create “an art which has never existed before.”  As members of the group, they became famous for seminal pieces with which they remain associated today: Tanaka’s Electric Dress (1956), a jumble of electric cables and lit-up colored lightbulbs which she wore like a garment; and Kanayama’s four-wheel remote control device which enabled him to create automatic Remote-Control Paintings (1957).  The artists married and left the group in the mid-1960s, and continued their artistic careers (at a steady pace in Tanaka’s case, in Kanayama’s case more intermittently) through the beginning of the 2000s.

Origins of Japanese Media Art – Artists Embracing Technology from 1950s to Early 1970s

Author: Dr. Prof. Machiko Kusahara

Painting by Machine
The Gutai artist Akira Kanayama is less known compared to his partner Atsuko Tanaka, the artist known for her “Electric Dress (1956), although the original use of technology and interest in materials that had not been traditionally used in art were shared among them. Kanayama helped Tanaka in realizing her ideas that involved technology such as her piece “Work (Bell)” (1955). Kanayama’s “Work” series produced mostly around 1957 involved a remote-controlled car with paint tanks he built himself, modifying a toy car. Kanayama tested a variety of crayons, markers, black and color ink with which the car scribbled or dripped while moving on large pieces of paper and later on white vinyl sheets, which he found the most appropriate for his purpose. While the artist operated the car on a sheet laid on the floor, its trajectory and the resulting traces of ink were never under the perfect control of the artist. Instead of directly employing one’s own body, as in case of other Gutai artists such as Kazuo Shiraga and Saburo Murakami, Kanayama used a mechanical medium and chance operation to drawn lines. His use of plastic inflatables and footsteps on vinyl sheets in other works also suggest his positive interest in new materials, and mediated representation of body. However, when Gutai was “discovered” by the French critic / art dealer Michel Tapié and internationally introduced, these features of Kanayama’s works were disregarded. It is said that his “Work” series was interpreted as alike of Jackson Pollock’s “all-over” style in the art world outside Japan, neglecting the interesting questions that arose about originality and the role of technology in art.

Eventually Gutai artists including Tanaka shifted to “paintings” rather than three-dimensional works involving unusual medium. By the time when Gutai was invited to participate the 1970 World Exposition in Osaka, Kanayama and Tanaka left the group.

Note: Some references give 1955 as the date for Kanayama's Remote-Controlled Painting Machine.  The first of the Gutai expositions were in 1955, but I've only been able to trace the machine to the 3rd expositiion held in a Museum in 1957. The 1955 exposition was an outdoor one.

The book Avant-Guard is also confused over these aspects, saying on the one hand the remote drawing machines were new for the 1957 Museum exposition, but also suggesting they were made earlier, but no proof is offered for the 1955 date. 

So claims such as ", prefiguring the Métamatic painting machines that the Swiss artist, Jean Tinguely, began to build in 1959."  are not correct from two fronts. Tinguely's MetaMatic Drawing Machine No.1 is from 1959, but two earlier drawing machines were built in 1955, the first, called "Machine à Dessiner No. 1"exhibited in the Le Movement exhibition in 1955