Meet Baxter

Watch How the Baxter Robot Works

Rodney Brooks's new start-up wants to spark a factory revolution with a low-cost, user-friendly robot

IEEE Spectrum | By Erico Guizzo, Evan Ackerman Read the entire Article

In the center of an otherwise unremarkable office stand six large robotic torsos mounted on pedestals and positioned along a bench that’s covered with piles of plastic widgets.

One robot methodically moves widget after widget onto a conveyor belt, the animated face on its LCD screen displaying an expression of quiet concentration. The task is mundane, but the robot is not: This is Baxter, the culmination of nearly five years of secretive development, based on the vision of Rodney Brooks, possibly the world’s most celebrated roboticist. Now founder, chairman, and CTO of Rethink Robotics, the company that built Baxter, Brooks has his sights set characteristically high: to unleash a revolution in manufacturing with a friendly faced factory robot.

Rethink was focusing on manufacturing; its robots would be so inexpensive every factory would be able to afford one; the robots would help make workers more efficient and American factories competitive again.

Brooks moves the arm around in a fluid motion, as if it were a weightless object. “When you hold the cuff, the robot goes into gravity-compensation, zero-force mode,” he says. His eyebrows shoot up. “It’s like the arm is essentially floating.”

This seemingly simple feature shows just one of the many ways in which Baxter is ... Read the entire Article