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Rethink Robotics Baxter is about 20 times cheaper than Willow Garage PR2 and can work for $4 per hour
From
NY Times – Rethink Robotics Baxter, comes encased in plastic and has a nine-foot “wingspan,” is relatively slow and imprecise in the way it moves. And it has an elaborate array of safety mechanisms and sensors to protect the human workers it assists.
The $22,000 robot that Rethink will begin selling in October is the clearest evidence yet that robotics is more than a laboratory curiosity or a tool only for large companies with vast amounts of capital. The company is betting it can broaden the market for robots by selling an inexpensive machine that can collaborate with human workers, the way the computer industry took off in the 1980s when the prices of PCs fell sharply and people without programming experience could start using them right out of the box.
“It feels like a true Macintosh moment for the robot world,” said Tony Fadell, the former Apple executive who oversaw the development of the iPod and the iPhone.
Baxter will come equipped with a library of simple tasks, or behaviors — for example, a “common sense” capability to recognize it must have an object in its hand before it can move and release it.
Although it will be possible to program Baxter, the Rethink designers avoid the term. Instead they talk about “training by demonstration.” For example, to pick up an object and move it, a human will instruct the robot by physically moving its arm and making it grab the object.
Rodney A. Brooks with Baxter, a robot he developed with an array of safety mechanisms and sensors. NY Times
See more and subscribe to NextBigFuture at 2012-09-19 07:26:38 Source: http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/09/rethink-robotics-baxter-is-about-20.html
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