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Momentum for reshoring had been steadily gaining steam. But when Rethink Robotics unveiled its Bax-ter robot last fall, it provided a powerful new boost

to efforts aimed at bringing manufacturing back to America. Baxter, described by Rethink as “the world’s first humanoid robot capable of applying common sense behavior to manufacturing environments,” is a mobile, 165-pound American-made robot—with a price tag under $30,000 and an array of user-friendly features—that’s designed to make U.S. manufacturers more competitive against regions that employ low-cost labor.

“Companies are just starting to use the robot; it’s just beginning to make it to manufacturing lines right now,” said Mitch Rosenberg, vice president of marketing and product management for Rethink Robotics, a Boston-based startup backed by Bezos Expeditions and the venture capital firms Charles River Ventures, Highland Capital Partners, Sigma Partners, and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. “But I would say the universal reaction is ‘We didn’t think this was possible.’ That’s the most frequent comment I hear. The universal reaction is that they’re really thrilled to have them, they’re having a lot of fun, and they didn’t think this was possible.”

Baxter is unlike traditional industrial robots in a number of ways, beginning with an unusually low price point that puts it well within reach of small and mid-size manufacturers. Designed to work safely around people in a production setting without safety caging, Baxter can perform a wide range of simple, repetitive tasks—including part and material handling, machine tending, testing and sorting, and light assembly—that have traditionally been lost to overseas labor. Besides having an unusually low base price of $22,000, Baxter takes affordability to a new level by eliminating the combined expenses of caging, integrating, and programming a traditional industrial robot.

“Manufacturers tend to be risk averse, and this price point makes it much more attractive for them to take a flier on a new technology,” said

Rosenberg. “So many of them are saying, ‘Because of this price point, this doesn’t feel risky at all.’ That’s a big factor.”

Baxter is based on the vision of Rethink’s founder and chief technical officer, Rodney Brooks, the co-founder of iRobot and

former director of the MIT Computer Science and Intel-ligence Lab. By breaking down the cost and safety barriers that have long limited the use of automation in American manufacturing, Baxter is said to “redefine how small, mid-size, and large domestic manufacturers use automation to compete with manufacturers in low-cost regions of the

world.” Its design is centered around the idea of mak-ing what Rethink’s vice president of product

development, Elaine Chen, calls “an incredibly inexpensive robot” that balances cost with performance (see “Building Baxter in the U.S.,” page 20).

“We embraced Design for Manufacturing and low-cost

manufacturing techniques very, very early on in the design cycle,” Chen said in a

phone interview. “Consequently, all of the parts that we have in the robot are mass producible us-

ing cost-effective manufacturing techniques, such as die casting and injection molding. We don’t have any

high-cost manufacturing processes of any significance in the robot. We’ve designed for a low-cost bill of ma-

terials and also low-cost manufacturing techniques.” From a hardware standpoint, Chen said

that Baxter is different from other industrial robots in that it’s a low- payload robot that’s very safe to be working side-by-side with people. “We’ve got load-level algorithms to detect forces at every joint,” she noted. “If somebody actually gets in the way of the robot arm while it’s moving, the robot arm would detect that and stop immediately.”

Chen often demonstrates this capability in her tradeshow demos. “I’ll let it get going,

and then I’ll kind of stick my head in the way of the elbow, and it will just stop immediately; it wouldn’t hurt. So that’s pretty innovative. We don’t know anybody else whose robot has such a sensitive force sensing threshold for people detection.”

Brooks, in a statement accompanying Bax-ter’s launch, noted that roboticists have had

INNOVATION

A New Reason to Rethink OffshoringA low-cost, easy-to-train robot that’s safe to work with people is designed to make American manufacturers more competitive with low-cost regions

By Mark Shortt

Not just a pretty face: Suited for manufacturers of all sizes, the Baxter robot from Rethink Robotics offers an intuitive user interface and vision-guided movement and object detection. Capabilities also include 360 degree sonar and front camera for human presence detection. Photo courtesy of Rethink Robotics.

31 September 2013 • www.d2pmagazine.com

previous successes in designing robots that can operate with super-human speed and precision. “What’s proven more difficult is inventing robots that can act as we do—in other words, that are able to inherently understand and adapt to their environments,” he said. “We believed that if we could cross that chasm with the manufacturing environment specifically in mind, we could offer new hope to the millions of American manufacturers who are looking for innovative ways to compete in our global economy.”

One of Baxter’s unique capabilities is its ability to apply common sense to its environment. If Baxter drops an object, for example, it knows to get another before trying to finish the task.

“‘Common sense’ means that the robot does what you expect, and signals to you what it’s going to do, so it interacts with you in a way that’s already familiar,” said Rosenberg. “You don’t have to learn how to interact with this robot. If you, for example, are ask-ing the robot to pick up items off of a conveyor belt that’s running a certain speed, and then you increase the speed of the conveyor by 20 percent, with a traditional robot, you’d have to reprogram for the new speed. You’d have to explain to the robot—using software and signals—that it had changed. With our system, just like with another human being, the robot automatically detects that things are going faster. Moreover, it automatically changes the way it guides its arm to pick up that item on the conveyor, exactly as your common sense would tell you a person would do it. That’s what we mean by common sense: It means that you don’t have to think of every detail that the robot has to know; the robot automatically adapts its behavior the way a human would.”

A driving force behind the development of Baxter has been to distinguish it from previous robots that were all about speed and precision, by building, instead, a new type of robot that’s more about the ability to sense and adapt to its environment.

“What that means is that our robot can work in a very un-structured environment,” said Chen. “You don’t have to always present the part in the same place. So, just as a human might not actually present a part to another human always in the same spot, the robot can actually use its vision to find the part and pick it up, even if it’s a couple of inches to the left of where it showed up the last time.”

Along with various sensors, sonar, and cameras, software is crucial to the development of Baxter’s unique capabilities. Re-think’s product strategy involves introducing a solid hardware platform, and then continually adding value to it by releasing frequent software updates. The company is currently working on a software development kit (SDK) for the manufacturing robot, but it has not been released for public use. In April, Rethink released its first feature update for its research robot, enabling users to customize the robot for specific types of work.

“With a very simple procedure, users can download the up-dater, update the software on the robot, and get a whole range of new functionality that enables them to do much more complex tasks,” said Chen. “That’s our strategy moving forward. We will have a steady cadence of new capabilities that bring some benefits to customers through regular software updates.”

If this sounds familiar, there’s good reason: It’s exactly what the PC industry pioneered, and is now a fact of life with cell phones and other mobile devices. Rethink’s innovation is to ap-ply the strategy to an industrial product.

“We believe that that’s really new and particularly valuable for our industrial product,” said Rosenberg. “One of our moti-vations for offering the Baxter research robot is the idea that if

researchers—both in industry and in academia—come up with nifty new applications for the robot, or nifty new ways to do things, we’d like there to be an ecosystem for taking advantage of that software. They can sell it on the open market or let us license it back from them, so that just like PCs and cell phones, the devices become more and more valuable over time, rather than depreciated and less valuable over time, the way traditional hardware based products are.”

Rosenberg said that interest in Baxter is such that “plenty of corporate researchers” are buying the robot and using it, even without the ability to write unique application code for it. “It’s really excited the imaginations of folks in both the manufactur-ing lines and the manufacturing labs,” he said. But Rethink’s strategy of opening up the development of the software to users reflects its growing recognition that the sky is the limit for future applications.

“We’ve chosen to focus our efforts on making a robot prod-uct that will help small and medium size businesses succeed in bringing manufacturing back to America,” said Chen. “That’s our mission. But we also realize, in creating the hardware platform, that this is a very general-purpose humanoid robot that can do a lot of other things. We have a lot of inquiries from people that are interested in using this robot for other verticals, like elder care and assisted living. So we thought the research SDK would be a good way for other people to explore those verticals.”

Manufacturing environments, in the meantime, are loaded with possibilities, including pick and place tasks, light assembly, material handling, machine tending, testing and sorting, and—eventually—finishing operations. “We’re seeing a number of, not just customers, but increased interest around packaging,” said Sue Sokoloski, Rethink’s director of marketing, at a product demo on the floor of the ATX East Automation Technology Expo in June. “Packaging seems to be a point of previously un-automated jobs. We’re seeing a lot of interest in the ‘end of the production line’ type of jobs.”

“They want parts handled, but you don’t need a computer sci-ence person to reprogram the robot on the line every few days,” said Anthony Robson, Rethink’s product manager, also at ATX East. “That’s Baxter’s sweet spot right now.”

“Baxter is great at pick and place,” added Rosenberg. “It can pick from one surface and put it in another; it can pick out of a bag and put it on a conveyor or vice versa. We just recently re-leased software to the marketplace that allows Baxter to interface to other machines. There are plenty of machines, obviously, in the manufacturing environment that can exchange signals so that they can sequence operations in an intelligent way, accept inputs from other sensors, et cetera. So that’s another set of ap-plications that we’re pursuing.

“We’re also very excited about the idea of using Baxter to tend other machines,” he added. “You can imagine that there are human beings that do repetitive motion every day, just push-ing the button on a polishing machine, for example, to make that machine go on. That’s an example of machine tending that requires some level of intelligence that is really not worthy of hav-ing a human being perform it, and it’s something Baxter could be very perfectly suited to. Eventually, we could imagine Baxter doing more physically demanding tasks, like finishing operations, like polishing or sanding surfaces, but that’s not something that we’re releasing right now. The simple summary is that there are a wide variety of manufacturing tasks that aren’t necessarily

32 DESIGN-2-PART magazine • September 2013

assembly, but require a lot of time and a lot of money and a lot of footprint in the factory, that Baxter could do very, very well.”

Many of these processes have been difficult, if not impossible, to cost-effectively automate in the past. Not only do traditional robots themselves carry price tags often exceeding six figures, but, unlike Baxter, they need to be programmed—a task that can take several months. After coming up with an idea to automate a production line, it could take up to nine months and several hundred thousand dollars before a traditional robot is actually ready to do something productive on that line, according to Chen.

“That only works when you have a product line that’s got a stable enough product going through it that it’s going to go long enough to make it worthwhile,” she said. “The product also has to be high value enough to have the market to support that. Whereas, our robot is different in that basically, you do not program it; there’s no integration necessary.

“Our vision is very much around having machine operators working on the manufacturing floor be able to go up to the robot and grab one of its hands and show it what it needs to do by demonstration,” she continued. “So how we train the robot to do that is entirely an integrated user experience—using the screen on the head, and the buttons, cups, and knobs that are on the arm and on the torso. There’s no programming at all in the manufacturing use case, and anybody can go up and teach the robot how to do something new in a matter of minutes to a maximum of a couple of hours. So then suddenly, some of the work that never would have been cost-effective to automate using the traditional way—something like a short run project with only 10,000 parts, for example, and you’re due to be done with that project after two weeks—could be automated using this robot.”

Many small and medium-size manufacturers, which often have less capital and do more of the short run operations that Chen described, are taking notice. Sokoloski said that the company doesn’t disclose the number of manufacturers that are currently using Baxter, but that it’s currently “in the hundreds.” Baxter’s affordable price tag and the fact that it doesn’t require expensive programming are enabling many of these companies to automate for the first time and, as a result, compete directly with overseas manufacturers.

Rethink is not only making a robot designed to keep produc-tion from migrating overseas; it’s also “putting its manufacturing where its mouth is” by building Baxter in the United States. More

Designed to work safely around people, Baxter can perform a number of different factory operations, including pick and place, part and material handling, testing and sorting, machine tending, packing and unpacking, and light assembly, among others. Photo courtesy of Rethink Robotics.

than 75 percent of the value of the robot is made in America. “It starts with our original vision for the purpose of the com-

pany,” said Rosenberg. “Our founder, Rod Brooks, felt that there was no reason at all why America should lose its manufacturing base given our level of skill and innovation, and his idea was to create an innovation that made it possible for manufacturing to take place economically in the United States. You may be familiar with the term ‘reshoring.’ The idea that we would be actively advocating this kind of change in the American economy while simultaneously contributing to the opposite trend didn’t seem to have integrity. So that was the first reason why we decided it was important to be made in America.

“As the marketing guy, I can tell you that this is a universally applauded attribute of the product from the point of view of customers and distributors,” he added. “There is so much enthu-siasm in this country for being a serious player in manufacturing again, and they love the idea that they can, in fact, do that while automating with an American-made robot.”

“From a technical standpoint, I can tell you there are extreme benefits to keeping innovation very close to manufacturing,” Chen added. “Our contract manufacturer is within driving dis-tance of headquarters, and that has made the process of actually bringing up the manufacturing line so much better. We’re able to go up there every other day if necessary. If any issues come up, we can go there immediately. Having manufacturing close to in-novation is really, really key to our successful journey in bringing up a manufacturing line and producing a quality product within a very short period of time. I don’t think we could have possibly done that, even if it was in Mexico. I don’t think we could have done that.”

Another reason for making the robot in America, Rosenberg added, is that Baxter represents “a huge amount” of intellectual property. “Many elements of it have never really been done be-fore, and we want to protect that intellectual property by making sure it doesn’t get copied and knocked off and manufactured by others,” he said. “So there are internal strategic reasons, in addition to market reasons, technical speed to market reasons, and general positive feelings about Made in America. There are reasons that are across the spectrum of business purposes [for making the robot in America].”

What type of feedback has Rethink been getting from companies that have used the robot so far?

Anthony Robson, product manager for Rethink, spoke with D2P on the floor of the ATX East Automation Technology Expo in June. He said that feedback on Baxter has been phenom-enal. “They love it—the fact that in a couple of hours, they can be Baxter experts and understand how to use it in different ways,” Robson said. “I think Baxter resonates with people in the manufacturing environment. I’ve had people say, ‘I don’t even know if I have an application,’ and they’ve bought one anyway. They buy into the mission of Rethink Robotics and are willing to buy one on spec, just in anticipation that they’ll find a way to use it because they identify with what we’re trying to do.”

“I think the most telling is that we’ll ship out a Baxter and we’ll say that we’ll be on site the next day to set it up with you, and before you get there, it’s like a kid on Christmas,” said Sokoloski. “They’ve already unpacked it, put it on its pedestal, figured it out, and they’re already getting it to work well before we show up. I think that’s the greatest testament to the robot. They’ve already figured it out, and we haven’t even landed on site yet.”