Based on the author's knowledge the paper gives a brief account of some of the scientific achievements of robotics that were of crucial importance to its development.

In a rough chronological order these are: zero-moment concept and semi-inverse method; recursive formulation of robot dynamics; computer-aided derivation of robot dynamics in symbolic form; dynamic approach to generation of trajectories of robotic manipulators; centralized feedforward control in robotics; robot dynamic control; decentralized control and observer applied to strongly coupled active mechanisms; force feedback in dynamic control of robots; decentralized control stability tests for robotic mechanisms; underactuated robotic systems; practical stability tests in robotics; unified approach to control laws synthesis for robot interacting with dynamic environment; modeling and control of multi-arm cooperating robots interacting with environment; connectionist algorithms for advanced learning control of robots interacting with dynamic environment; fuzzy logic robot control with model-based dynamic compensation, and internal redundancy – a new way to improve robot dynamic performance.

A 6-DOF motion bed is proposed as a nonlinear robust observer to solve the forward kinematics problem of a Stewart platform. The stability of the estimation error dynamics is proved via Lyapunov stability analysis and the error dynamics shows practical stability. An observer design algorithm which tackles the nonlinearity and uncertainty both in the system and in the output is presented by a new arithmetic Riccati equation. The estimation performance for the algorithm is verified using both simulations and experiments. The equation employs the bounding condition computed from the platform dynamics.