Rethink Robotics Baxter

Rethink Robotics' 2012 low-cost dual-arm collaborative robot, with an animated screen for a face.

Baxter is a dual-arm robot that Rethink Robotics — founded by iRobot co-founder Rodney Brooks — released in 2012, priced at about $22,000, far below industrial robots of the time. It has two 7-degree-of-freedom arms whose joints use series elastic actuators (a spring placed between the motor and the load, which makes the arm “give” a bit on contact with a person); its head is a screen that displays an animated face; and workers can teach it a motion just by physically grabbing and moving the arm, with no programming required. Baxter was an early example of the “collaborative robot” concept, and because a research edition existed, it became a common platform in robot-learning labs through the 2010s. Commercially, sales fell short of expectations, and Rethink Robotics shut down in 2018, ending Baxter's production.

ExampleThe RoboNet dataset includes video of Baxter pushing objects around, used to train video-prediction models.

Also called

Baxter

Related

Rethink Robotics · Rethink Robotics Sawyer · Collaborative Robot · Dual-arm Robot · Series Elastic Actuator (SEA) · Kinesthetic Teaching

Sources

Rethink Robotics launches Baxter the Robot (Robohub)
Rethink Robotics, Pioneer of Collaborative Robots, Shuts Down (IEEE Spectrum)

As of

2018-10