Rodney Brooks Chairman and CTO, Rethink Robotics, Inc. October 12, 2012 Abstract At Rethink Robotics we have been developing a new class of industrial robot. The transition from mainframes to PCs completely transformed office work, and then transformed how we access information in our daily lives. With mainframes only specialists had direct access to computation. With the PC ordinary people were empowered to control computation and to use if for their own purposes. The Baxter robot is aimed at an analogous transformation from current industrial robots which are installed, integrated, and controlled by specialists, to a situation where anybody who can work on a factory floor can install a robot and have it doing useful work within an hour. The important metrics for this new class of robot are adaptability, flexibility, and ease of use. And low cost. This talk will show how we defined and drove the design of the robot and its own manufacture to these metrics. Speaker Biography Rodney Brooks is the Panasonic Professor of Robotics (emeritus) at MIT. He is a robotics entrepreneur and Founder, Chairman and CTO of Rethink Robotics (formerly Heartland Robotics). He is also a Founder, former Board Member (1990 – 2011) and former CTO (1990 – 2008) of iRobot Corp (Nasdaq: IRBT). Dr. Brooks is the former Director (1997 – 2007) of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and then the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He received degrees in pure …

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