Rodney Brooks On Robots As Co-Workers

 Robotics  

In celebration of National Robotics Week recently, Rodney Brooks presented on the stage at Purdue University with two of his company's Baxter Robots.  In the talk, Brooks discusses how robotics will increasingly be part of our lives.

Rodney Brooks has been a professor of robotics at MIT, was co-founder of iRobot, is an international scholar, and is now chief evangelist (aka founder, chairman and chief technology officer) at Rethink Robotics where he is, again, revolutionizing robotics.

In the video above, recorded at Purdue University's National Robotics Week event, Brooks presents on how robotics is starting to really change all aspects of business. Purdue now has two of Rethink's Baxter robots on campus.

"What will it take to break out of making cheap stuff by hand?" asks Brooks

“Baxter … is one of the tools we can use to make humans and American workers more productive,” Richard Voyles, professor and associate dean for research at Purdue said. “And also avoid some of these dull, repetitive tasks.”

Brooks initially revolutionized mobile robots with a little crawler called Genghis and transformed our living rooms with the Roomba at iRobot. The initial work was to do robotics for space exploration.  Now, he wants to revolutionize manufacturing with humanoid robots like Baxter.

Related articles Dennis Hong On Robot Evolution and The DARPA Robotics Challenge  Peter W. Singer On The Robot Revolution  Rodney Brooks on Robots in the Workplace

With most of our manufacturing being done in small- and medium-sized companies and a national emphasis on re-shoring manufacturing jobs, how can robotics help, Brooks asks.

"Let's use robots instead of people," says Brooks in regards to work nobody wants to do.  Moreover, in terms of off-shoring, he proposes that using robotics to re-shore jobs to the US will help preserve the engineering know-how and industrial intelligence for companies.

Traditional industrial robots have been difficult to integrate into factories, especially small factories. They need to be caged for safety and need to have long production runs in order to be economically viable. Rethink Robotics has tackled these problems and developed a new low-cost robot that is being adopted in a variety of production environments.

Baxter is a two-armed robot -- with seven degrees of freedom on each arm -- available to researchers. Rethink Robotics believes that once there are thousands of people with access to open source manipulators, they will invent all sorts of new applications for robots, in health care and in elder care.

SOURCE  Purdue University

By 33rd Square

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