Businessweek: Smarter Robots, With No Pesky Uprisings
Measured against the hopes and horrors of science fiction, Baxter, a new manufacturing robot from a company called Rethink Robotics, is a huge disappointment. Although it’s got two Olympic swimmer-length arms and a set of expressive digitally rendered eyes and eyebrows, Baxter is legless and speechless. It can’t hold a conversation, pass for a human, or rise up against its masters in apocalyptic rebellion. But Baxter’s creators are out to spark a different kind of revolution. They hope the robot, adept at the mindlessly repetitive tasks common on most assembly lines, can increase the productivity of U.S. manufacturing firms and help them retain jobs that would otherwise migrate overseas to low-wage countries like China.
Boston-based Rethink is the brainchild of Rodney Brooks, a pioneering roboticist who has, perhaps more than anyone, ushered robots from sci-fi stories into people’s living rooms. Brooks, a former director of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, is a co-founder of iRobot (IRBT), the maker of the Roomba vacuum and the IED-disarming Packbot, a workhorse of the U.S. military. Both machines have redefined the term “robot” with a narrow scope of responsibilities and a simple user interface. The deep-red and charcoal-gray Baxter, which goes on sale next month, is the result of nearly four years of work by Rethink, which is emerging from stealth mode this week. …
… With five cameras, a sonar sensor that detects motion 360 degrees around the robot, and enough intelligence to learn new tasks within an hour, Baxter is designed to work safely alongside humans and do simple jobs like picking items off a conveyor belt. At $22,000 a unit, it is also cheap enough so that, performing menial labor for three years’ worth of eight-hour shifts, it functions as the equivalent of a $4-an-hour worker. “We are spending hundreds of billions of dollars doing this kind of work in China,” says Brooks. “We want companies to spend that here, in a way that lets American workers be way more productive.
To teach Baxter a new job, a human grabs its arms, simulates the desired task, and presses a button to program in the pattern. When the robot doesn’t understand what a person is trying to tell it during training, it looks up with a confused expression. Part of the original idea was that Baxter would be so easy for even unskilled workers to train that Rethink wouldn’t have to produce a manual. It ultimately did print one, but Brooks hopes no one uses it.
Another core idea behind Baxter is that it will ultimately be upgradeable, just like a smartphone. The company plans to update Baxter’s software for free every few months, enabling more complex behaviors like two-handed manipulation and the ability to push buttons on other machines. …
Leave a Reply