Measured against the hopes and horrors of science fiction, Baxter, a new manufacturing robot from a company called Rethink Robotics, is a huge disappointment.

Although it has two Olympic-swimmer-length arms and a set of expressive digitally rendered eyes and eyebrows, Baxter is legless and speechless. It can’t hold a conversation, pass for a human or rise up against its masters in apocalyptic rebellion.

But Baxter’s creators are out to spark a different kind of revolution. They hope the robot, adept at the mindlessly repetitive tasks common on most assembly lines, can increase the productivity of U.S. manufacturing firms and help them retain jobs that would otherwise migrate overseas to low-wage countries like China.

Rethink, in Boston, is the brainchild of Rodney Brooks, a pioneering roboticist who has, perhaps more than anyone else, ushered robots from sci-fi stories into people’s living rooms. Brooks, a former director of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, is a co-founder of iRobot, the maker of the Roomba vacuum and the IED-disarming Packbot, a workhorse of the U.S. military. Both machines have redefined the term “robot” with a narrow scope of responsibilities and a simple user interface.

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