The document discusses a new low-cost robot called Baxter created by Rethink Robotics that is designed to make US manufacturing more competitive. Baxter costs under $30,000, can perform simple repetitive tasks safely alongside people without cages, and is easy to program. Its low price point is helping more manufacturers adopt new automation technologies. Rethink plans to continually add new capabilities through software updates, treating Baxter like a platform that increases in value over time rather than depreciating like traditional hardware.

1. 30
Momentum for reshoring had been steadily gaining
steam. But when Rethink Robotics unveiled its Bax-
ter robot last fall, it provided a powerful new boost
to efforts aimed at bringing manufacturing back to America.
Baxter, described by Rethink as “the world’s first humanoid
robot capable of applying common sense behavior to
manufacturing environments,” is a mobile, 165-pound
American-made robot—with a price tag under $30,000
and an array of user-friendly features—that’s designed
to make U.S. manufacturers more competitive against
regions that employ low-cost labor.
“Companies are just starting to use
the robot; it’s just beginning to
make it to manufacturing
lines right now,” said Mitch
Rosenberg, vice president
of marketing and product
management for Rethink
Robotics, a Boston-based startup
backed by Bezos Expeditions and the
venture capital firms Charles River Ventures,
Highland Capital Partners, Sigma Partners,
and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. “But I would say
the universal reaction is ‘We didn’t think this was
possible.’ That’s the most frequent comment I hear.
The universal reaction is that they’re really thrilled to
have them, they’re having a lot of fun, and they didn’t
think this was possible.”
Baxter is unlike traditional industrial
robots in a number of ways, beginning
with an unusually low price point that puts
it well within reach of small and mid-size
manufacturers. Designed to work safely
around people in a production setting
without safety caging, Baxter can perform
a wide range of simple, repetitive tasks—
including part and material handling,
machine tending, testing and sorting,
and light assembly—that have traditionally
been lost to overseas labor. Besides having an
unusually low base price of $22,000, Baxter
takes affordability to a new level by eliminating
the combined expenses of caging, integrating,
and programming a traditional industrial robot.
“Manufacturers tend to be risk averse, and
this price point makes it much more attractive
for them to take a flier on a new technology,” said
Rosenberg. “So many of them are saying, ‘Because of this price
point, this doesn’t feel risky at all.’ That’s a big factor.”
Baxter is based on the vision of Rethink’s founder and chief
technical officer, Rodney Brooks, the co-founder of iRobot and
former director of the MIT Computer Science and Intel-
ligence Lab. By breaking down the cost and safety barriers
that have long limited the use of automation in American
manufacturing, Baxter is said to “redefine how small, mid-
size, and large domestic manufacturers use automation
to compete with manufacturers in low-cost regions of the
world.” Its design is centered around the idea of mak-
ing what Rethink’s vice president of product
development, Elaine Chen, calls
“an incredibly inexpensive
robot” that balances cost with
performance (see “Building
Baxter in the U.S.,” page 20).
“We embraced Design
for Manufacturing and low-cost
manufacturing techniques very, very
early on in the design cycle,” Chen said in a
phone interview. “Consequently, all of the parts
that we have in the robot are mass producible us-
ing cost-effective manufacturing techniques, such as
die casting and injection molding. We don’t have any
high-cost manufacturing processes of any significance
in the robot. We’ve designed for a low-cost bill of ma-
terials and also low-cost manufacturing techniques.”
From a hardware standpoint, Chen said
that Baxter is different from other industrial
robots in that it’s a low- payload robot that’s
very safe to be working side-by-side with
people. “We’ve got load-level algorithms to
detect forces at every joint,” she noted. “If
somebody actually gets in the way of the
robot arm while it’s moving, the robot arm
would detect that and stop immediately.”
Chen often demonstrates this capability
in her tradeshow demos. “I’ll let it get going,
and then I’ll kind of stick my head in the way
of the elbow, and it will just stop immediately;
it wouldn’t hurt. So that’s pretty innovative. We
don’t know anybody else whose robot has such
a sensitive force sensing threshold for people
detection.”
Brooks, in a statement accompanying Bax-
ter’s launch, noted that roboticists have had
INNOVATION
A New Reason to Rethink Offshoring
A low-cost, easy-to-train robot that’s safe to work with people is designed to make American
manufacturers more competitive with low-cost regions
By Mark Shortt
Not just a pretty face: Suited for
manufacturers of all sizes, the
Baxter robot from Rethink Robotics
offers an intuitive user interface and
vision-guided movement and object
detection. Capabilities also include
360 degree sonar and front camera
for human presence detection. Photo
courtesy of Rethink Robotics.

2. 31September 2013 • www.d2pmagazine.com
previous successes in designing robots that can operate with
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,”
he said. “We believed that if we could cross that chasm with the
manufacturing environment specifically in mind, we could offer
new hope to the millions of American manufacturers who are
looking for innovative ways to compete in our global economy.”
One of Baxter’s unique capabilities is its ability to apply
common sense to its environment. If Baxter drops an object, for
example, it knows to get another before trying to finish the task.
“‘Common sense’ means that the robot does what you expect,
and signals to you what it’s going to do, so it interacts with you in
a way that’s already familiar,” said Rosenberg. “You don’t have to
learn how to interact with this robot. If you, for example, are ask-
ing the robot to pick up items off of a conveyor belt that’s running
a certain speed, and then you increase the speed of the conveyor
by 20 percent, with a traditional robot, you’d have to reprogram
for the new speed. You’d have to explain to the robot—using
software and signals—that it had changed. With our system, just
like with another human being, the robot automatically detects
that things are going faster. Moreover, it automatically changes
the way it guides its arm to pick up that item on the conveyor,
exactly as your common sense would tell you a person would do
it. That’s what we mean by common sense: It means that you
don’t have to think of every detail that the robot has to know; the
robot automatically adapts its behavior the way a human would.”
A driving force behind the development of Baxter has been
to distinguish it from previous robots that were all about speed
and precision, by building, instead, a new type of robot that’s
more about the ability to sense and adapt to its environment.
“What that means is that our robot can work in a very un-
structured environment,” said Chen. “You don’t have to always
present the part in the same place. So, just as a human might not
actually present a part to another human always in the same spot,
the robot can actually use its vision to find the part and pick it
up, even if it’s a couple of inches to the left of where it showed
up the last time.”
Along with various sensors, sonar, and cameras, software is
crucial to the development of Baxter’s unique capabilities. Re-
think’s product strategy involves introducing a solid hardware
platform, and then continually adding value to it by releasing
frequent software updates. The company is currently working on
a software development kit (SDK) for the manufacturing robot,
but it has not been released for public use. In April, Rethink
released its first feature update for its research robot, enabling
users to customize the robot for specific types of work.
“With a very simple procedure, users can download the up-
dater, update the software on the robot, and get a whole range of
new functionality that enables them to do much more complex
tasks,” said Chen. “That’s our strategy moving forward. We will
have a steady cadence of new capabilities that bring some benefits
to customers through regular software updates.”
If this sounds familiar, there’s good reason: It’s exactly what
the PC industry pioneered, and is now a fact of life with cell
phones and other mobile devices. Rethink’s innovation is to ap-
ply the strategy to an industrial product.
“We believe that that’s really new and particularly valuable
for our industrial product,” said Rosenberg. “One of our moti-
vations for offering the Baxter research robot is the idea that if
researchers—both in industry and in academia—come up with
nifty new applications for the robot, or nifty new ways to do
things, we’d like there to be an ecosystem for taking advantage
of that software. They can sell it on the open market or let us
license it back from them, so that just like PCs and cell phones,
the devices become more and more valuable over time, rather
than depreciated and less valuable over time, the way traditional
hardware based products are.”
Rosenberg said that interest in Baxter is such that “plenty of
corporate researchers” are buying the robot and using it, even
without the ability to write unique application code for it. “It’s
really excited the imaginations of folks in both the manufactur-
ing lines and the manufacturing labs,” he said. But Rethink’s
strategy of opening up the development of the software to users
reflects its growing recognition that the sky is the limit for future
applications.
“We’ve chosen to focus our efforts on making a robot prod-
uct that will help small and medium size businesses succeed in
bringing manufacturing back to America,” said Chen. “That’s our
mission. But we also realize, in creating the hardware platform,
that this is a very general-purpose humanoid robot that can do
a lot of other things. We have a lot of inquiries from people that
are interested in using this robot for other verticals, like elder
care and assisted living. So we thought the research SDK would
be a good way for other people to explore those verticals.”
Manufacturing environments, in the meantime, are loaded
with possibilities, including pick and place tasks, light assembly,
material handling, machine tending, testing and sorting, and—
eventually—finishing operations. “We’re seeing a number of, not
just customers, but increased interest around packaging,” said Sue
Sokoloski, Rethink’s director of marketing, at a product demo
on the floor of the ATX East Automation Technology Expo in
June. “Packaging seems to be a point of previously un-automated
jobs. We’re seeing a lot of interest in the ‘end of the production
line’ type of jobs.”
“They want parts handled, but you don’t need a computer sci-
ence person to reprogram the robot on the line every few days,”
said Anthony Robson, Rethink’s product manager, also at ATX
East. “That’s Baxter’s sweet spot right now.”
“Baxter is great at pick and place,” added Rosenberg. “It can
pick from one surface and put it in another; it can pick out of
a bag and put it on a conveyor or vice versa. We just recently re-
leased software to the marketplace that allows Baxter to interface
to other machines. There are plenty of machines, obviously, in
the manufacturing environment that can exchange signals so
that they can sequence operations in an intelligent way, accept
inputs from other sensors, et cetera. So that’s another set of ap-
plications that we’re pursuing.
“We’re also very excited about the idea of using Baxter to
tend other machines,” he added. “You can imagine that there
are human beings that do repetitive motion every day, just push-
ing the button on a polishing machine, for example, to make
that machine go on. That’s an example of machine tending that
requires some level of intelligence that is really not worthy of hav-
ing a human being perform it, and it’s something Baxter could
be very perfectly suited to. Eventually, we could imagine Baxter
doing more physically demanding tasks, like finishing operations,
like polishing or sanding surfaces, but that’s not something that
we’re releasing right now. The simple summary is that there
are a wide variety of manufacturing tasks that aren’t necessarily

3. 32 DESIGN-2-PART magazine • September 2013
assembly, but require a lot of time and a lot of money and a lot
of footprint in the factory, that Baxter could do very, very well.”
Many of these processes have been difficult, if not impossible,
to cost-effectively automate in the past. Not only do traditional
robots themselves carry price tags often exceeding six figures,
but, unlike Baxter, they need to be programmed—a task that can
take several months. After coming up with an idea to automate
a production line, it could take up to nine months and several
hundred thousand dollars before a traditional robot is actually
ready to do something productive on that line, according to Chen.
“That only works when you have a product line that’s got
a stable enough product going through it that it’s going to go
long enough to make it worthwhile,” she said. “The product
also has to be high value enough to have the market to support
that. Whereas, our robot is different in that basically, you do not
program it; there’s no integration necessary.
“Our vision is very much around having machine operators
working on the manufacturing floor be able to go up to the
robot and grab one of its hands and show it what it needs to do
by demonstration,” she continued. “So how we train the robot
to do that is entirely an integrated user experience—using the
screen on the head, and the buttons, cups, and knobs that are
on the arm and on the torso. There’s no programming at all in
the manufacturing use case, and anybody can go up and teach
the robot how to do something new in a matter of minutes to a
maximum of a couple of hours. So then suddenly, some of the
work that never would have been cost-effective to automate using
the traditional way—something like a short run project with only
10,000 parts, for example, and you’re due to be done with that
project after two weeks—could be automated using this robot.”
Many small and medium-size manufacturers, which often have
less capital and do more of the short run operations that Chen
described, are taking notice. Sokoloski said that the company
doesn’t disclose the number of manufacturers that are currently
using Baxter, but that it’s currently “in the hundreds.” Baxter’s
affordable price tag and the fact that it doesn’t require expensive
programming are enabling many of these companies to automate
for the first time and, as a result, compete directly with overseas
manufacturers.
Rethink is not only making a robot designed to keep produc-
tion from migrating overseas; it’s also “putting its manufacturing
where its mouth is” by building Baxter in the United States. More
Designed to work safely around people, Baxter can perform a number of
different factory operations, including pick and place, part and material
handling, testing and sorting, machine tending, packing and unpacking,
and light assembly, among others. Photo courtesy of Rethink Robotics.
than 75 percent of the value of the robot is made in America.
“It starts with our original vision for the purpose of the com-
pany,” said Rosenberg. “Our founder, Rod Brooks, felt that there
was no reason at all why America should lose its manufacturing
base given our level of skill and innovation, and his idea was to
create an innovation that made it possible for manufacturing to
take place economically in the United States. You may be familiar
with the term ‘reshoring.’ The idea that we would be actively
advocating this kind of change in the American economy while
simultaneously contributing to the opposite trend didn’t seem
to have integrity. So that was the first reason why we decided it
was important to be made in America.
“As the marketing guy, I can tell you that this is a universally
applauded attribute of the product from the point of view of
customers and distributors,” he added. “There is so much enthu-
siasm in this country for being a serious player in manufacturing
again, and they love the idea that they can, in fact, do that while
automating with an American-made robot.”
“From a technical standpoint, I can tell you there are extreme
benefits to keeping innovation very close to manufacturing,”
Chen added. “Our contract manufacturer is within driving dis-
tance of headquarters, and that has made the process of actually
bringing up the manufacturing line so much better. We’re able
to go up there every other day if necessary. If any issues come up,
we can go there immediately. Having manufacturing close to in-
novation is really, really key to our successful journey in bringing
up a manufacturing line and producing a quality product within
a very short period of time. I don’t think we could have possibly
done that, even if it was in Mexico. I don’t think we could have
done that.”
Another reason for making the robot in America, Rosenberg
added, is that Baxter represents “a huge amount” of intellectual
property. “Many elements of it have never really been done be-
fore, and we want to protect that intellectual property by making
sure it doesn’t get copied and knocked off and manufactured
by others,” he said. “So there are internal strategic reasons, in
addition to market reasons, technical speed to market reasons,
and general positive feelings about Made in America. There are
reasons that are across the spectrum of business purposes [for
making the robot in America].”
WhattypeoffeedbackhasRethinkbeengettingfromcompanies
that have used the robot so far?
Anthony Robson, product manager for Rethink, spoke with
D2P on the floor of the ATX East Automation Technology Expo
in June. He said that feedback on Baxter has been phenom-
enal. “They love it—the fact that in a couple of hours, they can
be Baxter experts and understand how to use it in different
ways,” Robson said. “I think Baxter resonates with people in the
manufacturing environment. I’ve had people say, ‘I don’t even
know if I have an application,’ and they’ve bought one anyway.
They buy into the mission of Rethink Robotics and are willing
to buy one on spec, just in anticipation that they’ll find a way
to use it because they identify with what we’re trying to do.”
“I think the most telling is that we’ll ship out a Baxter and
we’ll say that we’ll be on site the next day to set it up with you,
and before you get there, it’s like a kid on Christmas,” said
Sokoloski. “They’ve already unpacked it, put it on its pedestal,
figured it out, and they’re already getting it to work well before
we show up. I think that’s the greatest testament to the robot.
They’ve already figured it out, and we haven’t even landed on
site yet.”