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This factory robot is small, precise and human-friendly
Picture a typical factory robot in your head and you'll probably see a cold, unsympathetic arm performing relatively simple tasks. You may want to shake that image soon, though. Rethink Robotics has taken the wraps off of Sawyer, a smaller sibling to its earlier Baxter model that's built for handling high-precision tasks that most machines can't tackle, such as testing circuit boards. The one-armed robot is designed to be as people-friendly as its predecessor, with a touchscreen for a face and software that lets you teach it by guiding it with your hands. The big improvements are in the arm itself. Sawyer is using new actuators and joints that make it smaller, faster and more precise, which should help with assembling or verifying lots of tiny parts.
Rethink delivers Baxter the friendly worker robot, prepares us for our future metal overlords (video)
No one would characterize existing factory robots as especially warm and fuzzy: they're usually disembodied limbs that are more likely to cut you than hug you. Rethink Robotics wants to put a friendly face on those machines, both figuratively and literally. Its about-to-ship Baxter worker robot carries a touchscreen face that's as much about communicating its intent as giving humans something more relatable. Likewise, it's designed to be easily programmed by its organic coworkers and react appropriately -- you guide Baxter by one of its two arms to tell it what to do, and its combination of cameras and a quad-core processor let it adapt to real-world imperfections. Even the series elastic actuators in its arms give it a softer, subtler movement that's less likely to damage products or people. While Baxter isn't as ruthlessly quick as most of its peers, the relatively low $22,000 price and promise of an SDK for its Linux brain in 2013 should make it easier to accept than the six-digit costs and closed platforms of alternatives. We just hope we're not being lulled into a false sense of security as lovable robots invade our manufacturing base ahead of the inevitable Robopocalypse. [Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
