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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Here are Goldstein’s Top 10 Phat Startups in no particular order. (Full disclosure: five of the 10 are North Bridge affiliated companies and they’ve been designated with NBVP.)

1. Heartland Robotics: iRobot and MIT alum Rodney Brooks’ Heartland Robotics is making robots flexible and cheap enough to do manual tasks that most people don’t want to do. Boston-based Heartland’s success in building “teachable” robots could mean that repetitive jobs that might otherwise go to China stay put.

2. Foro Energy: Littleton, Colo.-based Foro develops drills for oil exploration that use high-powered lasers to do the job faster and cleaner. The company says its  technology will enable oil companies to drill ten times faster than traditional drill bits. (NBVP)

3. Kurion: Kurion attacks the tricky problem of remediating nuclear waste. It’s take is to encapsulate the by-products in glass which can then be buried and stored for hundreds of years more safely. Kurion technology, which GigaOM’s Katie Fehrenbacher once called the most successful greentech startup you’ve never heard of,  has been used extensively in the cleanup from the Fukushima disaster.

4. Actifio:  Most big companies store way more copies (15 to 100 of them) of their data than they could possibly need. That’s because their various systems don’t know what copies are being held by other systems. Actifio’s plan is to enable those companies to keep and manage one copy of all that stuff. Actifio is based in Waltham, Mass. (NBVP)

5. Sand 9: Cambridge, Mass.-based Sand 9 makes cell phone components that enable them to scan many frequencies to cover their LTE, 3G, GSM, WiFi bases. Boston University spin-off Sand 9 builds MEMS-based resonators to accomplish that goal. It’s crazy to have to build eight different RF chains for each band there’s a real need for flexible components to cover that range, Goldstein said.

6. DataXu:  This company uses “rocket science” (seriously) to perform real-time analysis of how effective spending on advertising — online, mobile and video — is. Co-founder and CTO Bill Simmons developed the core technology at MIT while he was earning his Ph.D. in aeronautics and astronautics.  (He helped develop and test the real-time flight software that handled guidance and navigation for the Atlas rocket program.)

7. CompassEOS: Startup CompassEOS, (aka Compass Electro Optical Systems), based in Netanya, Israel, is still in stealth mode but Goldstein said it uses an electro-optical interconnect to produce what will be a next-generation router that he said will be smaller faster, cheaper and more energy efficient than the current state of the art.  (NBVP)

8. CoolPlanet Energy Systems: This sounds to good to be true. CoolPlanet‘s technology claims to produce “carbon negative” gas” out of biomass. As GigaOM reported last December, it has some pretty potent backers in BP, GE, Google and ConocoPhillips. The Camarillo, Calif. company builds tractor-trailer sized machines, that are clustered around biomass sources — farms, forests. They ingest corncobs, woodchips, whatever biomass is available, and spit out gasoline. (NBVP)

9. Makani Power: Makani creates airborne wings that it says can generate power much less expensively than traditional wind turbines. The company’s “tethered wings” can be deployed at high altitudes over land or sea, wherever wind is stronger and more consistant, according to the Makani website. Wing design eliminates 90 percent of the material used in conventional wind turbines.

10. Plexxi: Still in stealth mode, Cambridge-Mass.-based Plexxi isn’t saying much about what it’s doing other than it has to do with revamping data center networks to make them more flexible. Goldstein said the goal is to “make traditional 3-tier networking architectures obsolete.” The company is just now kicking off a road show so stay tuned. (NBVP)

Goldstein is not the first to call for more, um, gravitas from startups, but it’s good to be reminded that startups can — and should — attack the big problems.

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The chips that power today’s smartphones and tablets are expanding to robots as Texas Instruments and iRobot announced a new partnership on Monday. TI’s OMAP platform will be used by iRobot — maker of the Roomba and Scooba service robots — to help develop new robotic technologies.

The partnership is a fitting match. Between its home and government service robots, iRobot has sold more than 7.5 million units, helping to move the robotics market forward. Clearly, it’s a leader in this space. And Texas Instruments is no slouch in the chip department. The company’s OMAP platform powers a number of currently popular mobile devices, such as the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, Motorola’s Droid Razr and the Amazon Kindle Fire.

So why does iRobot need a mobile platform like the OMAP from TI? It’s all about the sensors and chip capabilities. Here’s what TI says, via email, that the OMAP platform will bring to the table:

• Targeted accelerators for multimedia, graphics, imaging and display
• High-performance, dual-external memory interfaces with short path (POP memory)
• Wide bus architecture (direct memory access for processors, accelerators, peripherals)
• Hardware and software support for the most advanced power management techniques
• Multiple power and voltage domains for advanced partitioning
• Unmatched imaging features, built from TI’s years of experience in digital still-camera deployments: fastest camera interface on the market, and dedicated software libraries

But this shouldn’t be surprising if you’ve been following the mobile device market. I called this trend of smartphone guts powering robots in a detailed report back in August of 2010 (subscription required), saying:

Back in 2004, we added an R2D2 Interactive Astromech droid to our family and the li’l fella has provided hours of fun: He dances, plays hide-and-seek and of course plays back memorable sound bites from the Star Wars franchise movies.

So robots in the home aren’t necessarily a new concept, but the ones I envision in a not-too-distant future will leverage various technologies of the smartphone, thanks to advances in chips, various sound and sight sensors, wireless broadband and software.

I also pointed out several examples of leveraging smartphone technology to make smarter robots: Faster chips for better “brains”; integrated connectivity for advanced services and a way to tap vast information stores; and sensor support adding “senses” such as eyesight, hearing and touch to the next generation of robots.

While I don’t know specifically what new products will come from the iRobot and TI partnership, it’s a safe bet that the robots of tomorrow will be smarter, more autonomous and far more interactive than the carpet cleaner devices of today. And you can thank the maturing smartphone, and the chips that power it, for that.

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There’s a new mobile app store available for millions of devices, but it’s not for iOS, Android, or Windows Phone handsets. As of Tuesday, the newest app store is for robots, and the first four apps are compatible with the estimated 6 million iRobot Roomba vacuums. Yes, we now have an app store for robots!

MyRobots.com just launched the new store which has some similarities to other mobile app stores. For example, the company will take 25 percent of any paid transactions for robot apps. One huge difference, however, is that these apps will run directly on a robot, or in the cloud for connected robots. Don’t expect, then, to see smartphone apps that interface with robots in this store.

The first initial applications add some interactivity to the Roomba, including a free app that allows you to have a text chat with your mobile vacuum. The three others are all priced at $25 and range in functionality: remote control over the web; mobile surveillance if you have a web-cam on your Roomba; and a telepresence app for when you’re away from home.

A developer program for the Robot App Store is now in beta, so developers can sign up to help shape the storefront with apps. Will this store ever rival the size and scope of the iTunes App Store? That’s not likely, but I do see many reasons to believe home robotics is the next big thing. I shared those ideas back in 2010 in a GigaOm Pro report (subscription required), saying the brains and sensors in a smartphone are enough to get the home robot movement rolling.

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The Burlington, Mass., company went public nearly two years ago and its share price has spent much of last year below the $24 offering price. Revenue from consumer products –60% of iRobot’s revenue last year – fell 1% in the first half of 2007 from a year ago.

Some of that decline was tied to waning appeal of iRobot’s flagship consumer product, the Roomba vacuum. But iRobot had some new products up its sleeve, and it announced them last week: a robot to clean out rain gutters, and a mobile robot that can send images of kids, pets or the infirm to remote PCs. The response? iRobot’s stock was down as much as 3.2% Friday, hardly a standing ovation.

Much of the press also seemed indifferent, if not disappointed, reflecting a very cautious attitude in the U.S. for robots in general: “Weird New iRobots Unleashed” (PC World); “Robot Invasion Escalates” (Washington Post); “iRobot’s New Products Could End Up Lonely and Unloved” (TheStreet.com).

Where’s the robot love? In Asia, apparently – and in Japan, particularly. But in the U.S. there’s a robot dread running like an undercurrent beneath our robot fascination. Isaac Asimov called this robot-phobia “the Frankenstein complex”, and it is deeply ingrained in American and European culture. Take a look at this list of the 50 best movie robots: From Hal to T-2 to the Fembots, we Westerners applaud evil robots and their fourth-reel destruction.

Neena Buck, a robotics analyst quoted in the AP’s coverage, noted a sharp difference in robot comfort between East Asia and the West.

“In the U.S., we want our robots to be utilitarian, and act as helpers to us,” Buck said. “In Japan and Korea, they think of robots as friends and pets, and as additions to their families.” But as prices come down, “I think Americans will be willing to experiment with cute-ish robots that do something like bring a family together.”

The culture gap is evident in this video of Asimo, Honda’s humanoid robot, breaking into a trot. The children and adults in the audience seem delighted, but my puerile American mind felt more ambivalent: I felt both impressed by the achievement and amused by a robot running like someone who is, shall we say, desperate to defecate. I also found iRobot’s photos of perfectly behaved children observed by the ConnectR creepy in a way I can’t describe.

And yet, I like the idea of affordable household robots that iRobot pioneered. iRobot built the Roomba like Apple (AAPL) built the early Macintosh: Both created from scratch an original platform that others can create applications for. Both made a machine simple to operate and easy for middle-class consumers to afford. And both popularized a fledgling industry that had massive potential over coming decades.

But household robots face an obstacle that personal computers didn’t: the Frankenstein complex.

Not only are we revolted by robots that are overly humanoid, we are also cold to robots that are overly utilitarian. We don’t want robots to be too much like us, but we are bored if they aren’t as fancy as the ones we’ve seen in movies.

I still think household robots could be a huge market down the road, and that iRobot could be a big player in it, but it will take decades. In the meantime, a lot depends on how companies like iRobot manage our contradictory feelings about robots.

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