Robotics
| Robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks envisions a world in the future where robots are as ubiquitous as our smart phones are today. According to Brooks, robots will not take our jobs away, but will be required to maintain our standard of living. |
Rodney Brooks doesn't think that robots are going to take your job, rather he thinks there won't be enough robots around to maintain peoples' standard of living in the not-too-distant future.
With the workplace aging worldwide, Brooks says there aren't enough new workers to replace the factory jobs of today, and there will not be enough medical personnel to deal with the increasing number of people requiring care. For Brooks, robots are the solution.
Brooks is founder, CTO, and Chairman of Rethink Robotics, a 2008 Boston-based startup. The company is developing a new class of industrial robot, Baxter. Rethink's robots are to current industrial robots what the PC was to the mainframe.
Recently the company also opened up Baxter to be sold as a research platform. The Baxter Research Robot is revolutionizing how labs of all sizes are able to leverage cutting edge technology to develop their own great innovations.
Baxter Research Robot is a $22,000 humanoid robot platform with two 7-axis arms, integrated cameras, sonar, torque sensors, and direct programming access via a standard ROS interface. It is entirely safe to operate around humans without safety cages, making it the perfect companion for late nights in the lab… with no extra pizza required.
The new robots are made in the USA. Brooks was also a co-founder of iRobot and was variously CTO, Chairman, and board member from 1990 until 2011.
From 1984 to 2010 he was on the faculty at MIT as the Panasonic Professor of Robotics, and was the director of MIT CSAIL, the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. While at MIT he developed the behavior-based approach to robotics that underlies the robots of both iRobot and Rethink Robotics.
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