Famed roboticist Rodney Brooks is back with a breakthrough invention that could revitalize American manufacturing and automate millions of jobs.
Doron Gild
Beyond Vacuums: Rodney Brooks, the creator of the Roomba, is back with a new breakthrough invention--a robot for businesses.
Two years ago, Scott Eckert, while on vacation in the south of France, gathered his family around his laptop. The month before, he had accepted a job as CEO of a secretive start-up that was developing an industrial robot, and now he was about to see a video of the first demo of the machine.
He and his two children watched silently as the robot, which turned out to be no more than a small, cranelike arm, shakily grabbed and lifted a plastic disk. The video ended. His 6-year-old son broke the silence. "Dad, is that it?" he said. Eckert wondered the same.
Everything about the company Eckert would soon be running had been a bit mysterious. When the headhunter contacted him months before, he wouldn't tell Eckert much except that the company had been founded by famed scientist Rodney Brooks, who, until a few years earlier, had led MIT's computer-science and artificial-intelligence lab. Brooks, perhaps the most acclaimed roboticist alive, had co-founded iRobot, maker of the hugely successful Roomba vacuuming robot.
Eckert, a former Dell executive who co-founded Motion Computing, a tablet company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, met Brooks in a hotel lobby. At the meeting, Brooks continued to be sketchy on details, Eckert recalls, but he was enthusiastic. Brooks explained that he wanted to take robotics to the next stage by bringing out a game-changing robot for manufacturing companies. One that, compared with existing industrial robots, would be easier to deploy, more useful, and much, much cheaper--making it affordable even to small companies. Brooks said he was convinced his company could sell tens of thousands of them, even hundreds of thousands. Maybe millions. Brilliant young robotics engineers were already on his team and making great progress.
Eckert checked out Brooks every way he could and heard nothing but good things. He called many of his contacts in the manufacturing world. "They all told me, 'Hell, yes, we'd love to have a cheap, easy-to-set-up, capable robot; are you kidding?''" Eckert took the job, agreeing to start right after he whisked his family away for a long-planned vacation to France.
Now, having seen the video, he had to wonder: Had he made a mistake in putting his faith in Brooks?
But it turns out Brooks was just getting warmed up. That robot arm was merely the start. Brooks already had the team at his company, Rethink Robotics, hard at work building something much more ambitious. Called Baxter, it is a humanoid robot that has the potential to be everything Brooks was shooting for: a breeze to use, capable of handling any number of basic assembly-line jobs, and ridiculously cheap. Many experts would have said such a robot was a decade or more away.
In fact, Baxter is set to go on sale in October. But Brooks is the first to admit that the success of this product is no sure thing. For starters, it is at the absolute bleeding edge of one of the most daunting challenges facing scientists and engineers for centuries: how to endow machines with human capabilities. Getting Baxter to work has required innovating on multiple, complex fronts at once and then making it all work together seamlessly.
And even if Baxter works as hoped, there is no guarantee that companies will buy it in big numbers. "No one has ever done anything like this, so there's no way of knowing what companies will make of it," says Brooks. "Getting people to buy them is the one thing that we absolutely have to do. And it's the one thing that worries me."
Consider it the risk that goes along with a humongous upside. Brooks's plan for Baxter is so ambitious that it's almost scary: replacing humans in millions of jobs in the U.S. alone. Baxter can be taken out of the box, set up, trained, and put to work in about one hour. At $22,000 each--less than the price of a minivan--it could easily pay for itself in months, saving a company $30,000 a year or more in labor costs per robot. (This will be a good thing even for the workers who are replaced, Brooks argues, because they will get better jobs--but more on that later.)
That's just Baxter 1.0. A few years from now, Baxter could take over more complex jobs on manufacturing lines, such as operating machinery. Perhaps one day, it could also make a mark on service industries. Picture Baxter flipping burgers, tending cash registers, sorting files.
And Brooks hints at even more ambitious plans. He is aiming at no less than a revolution in how work gets done, one that would change the economics of labor. "This robot will just keep on improving, and doing more and more," he says.
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