I meet Baxter in July, at Rethink's offices in what the city of Boston has taken to calling its Innovation District, a once- and to some extent still-gritty area outside of downtown, on the wrong side of the charmless Fort Point Channel. The site on which the offices are situated happens to be the former location of the first electrified factory in Boston, once seen as heralding the future of manufacturing. It's a history hardly lost on the Rethink team. Inside, the offices are a cross between the usual high-tech swanky blandness and a busy workshop. The cubicles are punctuated with workbenches and shelving that are littered with all sorts of random-seeming odds and ends, such as cereal boxes and automotive parts. (These are items Baxter uses to practice on.) Also perched on some of the surfaces is the occasional humanoid robot or parts thereof.
Baxter is something like a cartoonist's vision of what the top half of a friendly, uncomplicated, but hardworking robot would look like. Robots can easily come off as either creepy or goofy, but Baxter strikes a pleasant enough balance between the humanoid and the machine, with a head consisting of a computer screen displaying a line drawing of a face. The particular robot in my demonstration is bolted to a pedestal behind a workbench, which would be a fairly typical arrangement at customer sites.
In this demo, the idea is that I will teach Baxter to move a random widget. I'll grab one of Baxter's arms, position it over a widget, and with the click of a button mounted on the arm, I'll confirm to Baxter that this is the object I want it to be able to recognize and pick up. Then, Baxter will pick up the widget in the fingerlike grippers at the end of one of its arms, at which point I will guide Baxter's arm to where I want it to place the widget. After that, Baxter should be able to do all that on its own, over and over again, as widgets parade by it on a hypothetical conveyor belt, unfazed by variation in how the widgets are positioned. Baxter should be able to stick the widget in a box, put it in an electrical tester and sort it into Pass and Fail piles, drive a screw into it--whatever's needed, as long as it's a fairly simple task.
Brooks has made it clear to me that this demo is premature--it's one of the first being given to the outside world, and Baxter is still undergoing intense tweaking. And sure enough, Baxter misbehaves at the start, having trouble with every step, finally becoming sullen, or so it feels to me, though technically it has merely become nonresponsive. An employee patiently reboots Baxter, as one would a balky laptop or cell phone. The second time around, everything goes pretty much as it's supposed to. Baxter works.
But not like other machines. In particular, Baxter doesn't--and wasn't intended to--move in the precise, sharp, angular way normally associated with robots (and with those tiresome people who imitate them). Instead, it seems a bit uncertain, taking its time and struggling a bit to get it right. As it does so, its screen-based face goes through a range of expressions, finally settling into one of contentment when it hits its groove. For an industrial robot, Baxter seems, well, laid back.
Brooks, on the other hand, hovers near the demo like an anxious parent. He is clearly trying to resist intervening but occasionally fails and jumps in to run things. He has participated in demos of various robots hundreds of times over the years, but he confesses he is nervous about this one. "We still have a number of bugs to work out," he says with a shrug. It's about two months before the official release date.
Later that day, Brooks regains his normal, affably edgy composure while he traces out his path from academic superstardom to high-profile entrepreneurship. When he stepped down from running the artificial-intelligence lab at MIT in 2007, he recalls, people were so shocked they asked him if he had a serious illness. What he had, in fact, was an urge to get back to the hands-on robotics tinkering of his early career. Brooks began toying with ideas for making robots more useful.
That, in a sense, is what all roboticists do. But Brooks has always had a more down-to-earth idea of what useful means. In the mid-1980s, when robotics was struggling to come up with complex software programs to mimic human intelligence, Brooks electrified the field with simple, insectlike crawling robots created with bare-bones programming. His machines excelled at real-world tasks, like getting around an office without bumping into things, and were relatively inexpensive.
Brooks became a clear leader in the field and drew all sorts of funding for experimental robots. But what he really wanted to do was see robots become integrated into everyday life, and that meant starting a business. His first was aimed at producing advanced toy robots that would cost just $100, leading him to tour Asian factories to understand the art of making things cheaply. The company he co-founded in 1990, iRobot, eventually ended up abandoning toys for robotic vacuum cleaners, scoring big with the Roomba's release in 2002. "When I started my career, there were a few hundred mobile robots in the world," he says. "iRobot made more than a million robots last year." The company's annual sales now top $465 million.
Brooks left iRobot in 2008, but the success gave him the first and perhaps most important of a series of what he calls maxims that guide him at Rethink, and with which he plies his employees in lieu of actually telling them what to do. ("I don't manage," he says. "I have no reports, and I don't want any.") That first maxim: Get something out that's so laden with breakthrough capabilities at such a low price that the competition will be crushed before it exists. "There are competitors to Roomba, but even today, they don't work as well as our first one did, and they cost more," he says.
Vacuuming proved a sweet spot in the previously nonexistent mass-robotics market, and Brooks was determined to find another. Having succeeded in the home, he turned his attention to robots for businesses. Though there wasn't much need for robots in offices, factories were another matter. Industrial robots have long been handling heavy-duty chores such as welding and spray painting for big automotive companies, but those can cost $100,000 or more. And then the real expense kicks in: They have to be carefully set up and programmed by experts to rapidly perform actions to precisions of one-hundredth of an inch, over and over again, without any variation. Assembly lines have to be built around them. And they have to be operated in caged areas away from workers to avoid crushing someone's skull in the blink of an eye.
For the most part, these robots are affordable only for the largest heavy-industry companies. What, wondered Brooks, would a robot for the rest of the manufacturing world look like and do? He pored over labor statistics on manufacturing. The new sweet spot, he decided, was materials handling, which basically means picking things up and putting them down, usually on assembly lines. A lot of those jobs could be handled by a robot with a dexterous arm. Narrowing things down by difficulty of task, he came up with a list of jobs that he was sure he could build a robot to handle. It was a list of jobs performed by 800,000 people in the U.S.
If Brooks could develop a $22,000 machine capable of grabbing parts and shoving them somewhere usefully, he was looking at a $16 billion market. By the summer of 2008, Brooks was raising money for his new robotics company.
