Rodney Brooks has been working in the field of robotics since the 1970s, and is considered one of the world’s foremost roboticists. In 1990 Brooks cofounded irobot, which has produced a number of innovative robots including the roomba vacuum cleaner. In 2008 Brooks co-founded Rethink Robotics with the aim of creating inexpensive, versatile, and easy to use manufacturing robots that could work directly with humans. Rethink Robotics recently unveiled the highly configurable Baxter robot, which should be the first in a series of increasingly sophistic ated and autonomous robots. In an interview with Sander Olson for Next Big Future, Brooks discusses the capabilities of Baxter, why he believes that Baxter is a game-changing robot, and what industries will be transformed by robotics in the coming decade.
Rodney Brooks
Question: Your company recently changed its name from Heartland Robotics to Rethink Robotics. This implies that a new generation of robots is emerging.
The first manufacturing robots emerged in 1961, when sensing and computation were expensive. Since then, robots have been used in welding and painting, but are generally not deployed in the assembly line. This is because robots were too dangerous, and difficult to interact with. Just as the PC transformed the way people interacted with computers, these new generation robots are inexpensive, and are designed to safely interact with humans, to be trainable, and to be an easy to use tool.
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