GigaOM » Baxter

Baxter the Robot — now available for research

Barb Darrow — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 19:23:14 +0000

Remember Baxter the Robot? The $22,000 machine initially built for manufacturing applications can now be repurposed for research tasks, according to Rethink Robotics.

Baxter’s advantages lie in its ability to “learn” tasks from a person who walks it through a series of motions. The trainer need not be a computer programmer. And, because Baxter is sedentary — it doesn’t roll or walk around — there is no need for protective cages to separate it from human co-workers. For tasks that can be performed at a countertop or an assembly line, Baxter could be an ideal worker.

Rethink has said all along that Baxter will move on to other types of jobs, including, potentially, home healthcare. Last fall, Rethink CEO Rodney Brooks promised a Software Development Kit (SDK) that would enable Baxter to be refashioned for new jobs over time. “Our story is manufacturing, but there will be new software every two to three months with new capabilities,” Brooks, pictured above, told EMtech 2012 attendees in October. “Researchers will find places to use it that we wouldn’t have guessed.”

Here’s the scoop from Rethink’s web site:

“Baxter Research Robot is a $22,000 humanoid robot platform with two 7-axis arms, integrated cameras, sonar, torque sensors, and direct programming access via a standard ROS interface. It is entirely safe to operate around humans without safety cages, making it the perfect companion for late nights in the lab… with no extra pizza required.”

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Meet Baxter, the “huggable” robot for your grandma

Barb Darrow — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 17:45:53 +0000

Baxter, the $22,000 industrial robot manufactured in the US for US manufacturing companies, could find applications in more personal settings, including eldercare, in the not-too-distant future.

Baxter (left) with Rethink Robotics CEO Rodney Brooks.

Rethink Robotics, the company behind Baxter, will release a software development kit (SDK) for the robot in January that could open the floodgates for new applications, said Rodney Brooks, robotics genius and CEO of Rethink. “Our story is manufacturing, but there will be new software every two to three months with new capabilities,” Brooks told attendees of EMtech 2012 at MIT Wednesday morning. “Researchers will find places to use it that we wouldn’t have guessed.”

Baxter is appealing for personal applications like eldercare and healthcare assistance because it is easily trained by mere mortals who can walk the robot through its tasks — without coding. And, unlike large and powerful industrial robots of the past — which are segregated from people on the factory floor for safety reasons — Baxter is approachable by actual people.

“Yes,” Brooks said, “you can hug this robot.”

The idea of robots helping senior citizens is not new. There is increasing evidence that it is both more economical and healthier to keep older people in their homes, as opposed to nursing homes or assisted care facilities, so there’s a potentially huge market for technology that can help.

As Scientific American reported in 2010:

The idea is to use robots, resembling anything from lunch carts to human companions, to assist seniors and the homebound with day-to-day tasks as well as communications with family members via social networking, videoconferencing and the Web. For this to work the interface with the robot must be intuitive, and robot-makers must allay any misgivings that the elderly might have about relying on new technology to watch over them.

I watched a Rethink employee train Baxter to perform a set task and it was pretty amazing. Because of the easy user interface — you pick up Baxter’s arm and move it through the required motions, then push a button to save that sequence — Baxter really does seem, as Brooks said, more like an iPhone than a robot. That means health aides, nurses or grandchildren could train Baxter to perform a range of repetitive tasks.

Baxter picks up Junior Mints.

Given the demographics of the aging population, there will be a need for much more productivity in eldercare going forward, Brooks said. Baxter sports an expressive on-screen “human” face that can register uncertainty if he is unable to comprehend what he’s supposed to do.

Baxter just started shipping, and Wednesday’s event at MIT’s Media Lab was his first public showcase. He (or “it,” as Brooks prefers to call Baxter) held center stage in the MIT Media Lab’s Winter Garden, plucking up boxes of Junior Mints and candles and loading them into a plastic Jack O’Lantern.

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What does iPhone have to do with robots?

Om Malik — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 07:00:55 +0000

The smartphone revolution that started in earnest with the launch of iPhone five years ago is having unintended consequences on the future of technology, and perhaps the economy. The latest example is today’s announcement of Baxter, a new manufacturing robot from Rethink Robotics, a Boston-based startup co-founded by robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks. And it was one of the reasons I got on the phone with Brooks, who is sometimes called the “bad boy of robotics.”

Our conversation, though limited to half-an-hour, spanned many topics but mostly centered around the role robotics can play in bringing back manufacturing to America. Brooks was on the faculty of MIT as the Panasonic Professor of Robotics and is also the man who started iRobot, the company well known for its household chores robot, Roomba. It was during the process of building iRobot when he realized that robots were going to be key for rethinking and re-imagining low-cost manufacturing in the twenty-first century.

During his Roomba-phase, it became quite clear to Brooks that low-cost manufacturing economies often run into the ceiling of rising standards of living. From Japan to South Korea, from Taiwan to China and more recently to Vietnam — the low cost manufacturing hot-spots continue to shift and there is nothing wrong with the shift, Brooks argues.

However, what happens when the world runs out of shifting manufacturing bases such as those in Asia? Another thing on the mind of Brooks: oil price spikes were adding a fuel surcharge on the low cost products. And there is always the looming threat of intellectual property being compromised. Brooks points out that there are a lot of Roomba replicas. “The big question to me was, ‘can we make low cost goods in the US?’” he said. “It is clear we can’t pay the same wages as places like China.”

It was this backdrop which lead him to start Rethink Robots in 2008 to work on manufacturing robots. It was originally called Heartland Robotics and has raised ~~$57~~ $62 million in funding from the likes of Jeff Bezos’ Bezos Expeditions, Highland Capital Partners, Charles River Ventures, Sigma Partners and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

Cheap but not cheesy

Today when we think of manufacturing robots, we quickly recall giant robots that are installed in the car plants inside body shops and paint shops. They cost millions of dollars and are programmed by specialists to do very specific tasks. They are like the mainframes of manufacturing robots.

And that is why the development and release of Baxter is so interesting. It is an inexpensive (sub-$25,000) semi-anthropomorphic line robot that is relatively simple to program. It is very flexible. And it has the potential of reshaping the manufacturing processes — first in mind-numbingly boring tasks such as packaging and removing things off a conveyer belt. “It doesn’t have the dexterity to build an iPhone, but it sure can package an iPhone,” Brooks quipped.

As technology has become more pervasive in our lives, most of us (and by that I don’t mean the early adopters) have gotten used to working with technology without needing manuals. The popularity of touch-based smartphone and society’s growing ease of using search and Facebook means that today, if you make robots simple enough, it is less likely that folks are going to be overwhelmed by them. The trick is to make them augment the humans in the manufacturing process.

What about society’s natural fear of robots and them taking over the world? Brooks laughed, and then pointed out that just as electric drills have made the jobs of construction workers easier, the same goes for these manufacturing robots. Just as computers opened up new opportunities, Baxter and its descendants are going to create new opportunities. Brooks knows it is going to take a long time.

“Simple tasks today,” Brooks said. More complex task will follow in time, thanks to the marriage of hardware and software, he added. In thirty years we have gone from mainframes to computers in our pocket and soon they will be embedded into our bodies, Brooks says. Robots are going to go through the same curve as well.

Smartphones say hello to robots

Like Brooks, I am a firm believer in a future where such machines start to assist in our daily tasks, though the final shape and form of these machines might look entirely different. Will robotics progress fast enough to bring manufacturing back to U.S.? Who knows. After all, we are still not clear as to what kind of manufacturing base we want to build. But the future is exciting and full of possibilities nonetheless.

What is even more exciting — well, at least to me — is that the road to this robotic future is littered with billions of smartphones. The reason why we can build robots like Baxter today is because of the falling prices of sensors and other components. Before the iPhone rolled around, phones didn’t use that many chips. Apple came along and made it normal to demand gyrometers ~~pyrometers~~, accelerometers, digital cameras, touch and other such sensors.

The growing number of smartphones — a billion shipped by 2016 — has helped the cost of making these sensors and mobile processors decline at a dramatic rate. The chips insider are getting beefier and more capable. It is Moore’s law at work, only at gigantic scale, as my colleague Kevin Tofel wrote last year. And that the reason why Baxter is so cheap to build, because “robotics doesn’t have to work hard to get scale,” he points. Baxter uses nine ARM-cortex chips that are made by Texas Instruments to work and they are all getting cheaper because of the cellphones.

Amazing, isn’t it? And here we were thinking that iPhone and its Android brethren were no more than tools for sharing photos and sending inane status updates.

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Baxter may not be Rosie the Robot, but he’s getting close

Barb Darrow — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 16:23:24 +0000

Industrial robots are fine. They do tons of repetitive, mind-numbing work that people don’t want to do. But they’re rigid and set in their ways. Baxter is different. Baxter is the adaptive, “teachable,” more human-like robot built by Rethink Robotics right here in the US to help US manufacturers compete.

Baxter is much more freewheeling and flexible — both physically and, um, mentally — than his industrial forebears. He adapts to many manufacturing jobs, including handling materials; loading and unloading production lines; packing and unpacking boxes; and light assembly and finishing work.

Baxter is updated regularly via software but he does not require a teaching pendant or a computer programmer to train or run. A human-like interface — an on-screen face that registers happiness, surprise, unhappiness — should make robot-human interaction more, well, human.

Initially, he is shown what to do — typically by the person who used to do that task — and then can adapt to changing conditions (e.g., if the line slows down or speeds up). In Rethink’s rosy scenario, the person who trains Baxter then supervises robots doing the job rather than doing the job himself.

Rethink, once known as Heartland Robotics, was founded by Rodney Brooks, a professor emeritus in robotics at MIT and founder of iRobot, who is sometimes described as “the bad boy of robotics.”

Last May, North Bridge Venture Partners’ Jamie Goldstein named Heartland Robotics one of his top 10 phat startups – new tech companies taking on big, hard problems. In his view, the company’s “teachable” robots could mean that repetitive jobs that might otherwise go to China stay in this country.

According to a report in IEEE Spectrum, Brooks’ work in China, where he supervised the making of iRobot’s products, drive him to build a robot to help U.S. manufacturers. Brooks told Spectrum:

I realized that [outsourcing manufacturing to China] wasn’t sustainable, because once the cost of Chinese labor starts to go up, the appeal of doing a product there starts to go away.

That sparked the idea for a simple robot that could handle lots of these manual tasks using the same sensors and components that flow into PCs and smartphones.

Check out the Rethink Robotics video to see Baxter at work:

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