Baxter the robot showed what it could do at the USA Science & Engineering Festival in Washington, D.C., on the weekend.
Its movements may appear simple, but this robot could be a big part of a big shift in manufacturing. When Baxter was first unveiled in 2012, Rethink Robotics founder Rodney Brooks told Epoch Times “Roboticists have been successful in designing robots capable of super-human speed and precision. What’s proven more difficult is inventing robots that can act as we do—in other words, that are able to inherently understand and adapt to their environments.”
Brooks is renowned for his artificial intelligence expertise and he was a long-time instructor at MIT before establishing his company and developing Baxter. His robot is designed to react to its environment. To address safety concerns about the use of robots in the workplace, Baxter is designed to stop its activity as soon as it encounters resistance and it also has sensors to detect human movement.
It is smarter than a lot of other robots. If it drops something it is working with, for example, it knows and compensates, whereas other robots keep performing as though they still have the object in hand.
With a price tag of $22,000, Baxter could become an increasingly common colleague for American workers in the years to come.
To read more about Baxter, see Epoch Times article “Humanoid Robot to Revolutionize U.S. Manufacturing.”
Epoch Times was a media sponsor of the 2014 USA Science & Engineering Festival in Washington, D.C., April 26–27. The USA Science & Engineering Festival is a national grassroots effort to advance STEM education and inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers. See more articles on the USA Science & Engineering Festival.
With reporting by Epoch Times staff member Valentin Schmid
