Labor Revolution Begins As Robot Learns From Humans
(Ron Amadeo) Meet Baxter, a six-foot-tall, 300-pound industrial robot with a tablet for a face. If you’ve ever seen or read a sci-fi story where factory workers are replaced by robots, Baxter is that robot. It can pack things in boxes. It can inspect, sort, and align parts. Baxter can even do “light” assembly. For $25,000—about the average annual cost of a US production worker’s salary—customers can drop Baxter into a repetitive assembly line job and have it work alongside its human counterparts. This past week, when Ars attend ATX East (that’s “Automated Technology eXpo”) in New York City, Baxter was on display. We taught it to stack cups.
Baxter has two arms with five joints each, allowing it to move items from one location to another. The torso contains the computer and a few vacuum connections for the optional suction cup hands. The head is a (non-touch) tablet used to work Baxter’s UI, show what Baxter is currently paying attention to, and communicate status.
This robot doesn’t really have “legs” and can’t move on its own—it’s just a torso on a stick. The torso can be bolted to a table or placed on a stationary pedestal. There is also an optional unpowered, wheeled base, but mostly Baxter is content to sit at its post in the factory.
Baxter is built by Rethink Robotics, a company that was founded in 2008 by Rodney Brooks. Brooks is the co-founder and former CTO of iRobot, makers of the popular robo-vacuum the Roomba (not to mention some scary military robots). Like iRobot, Rethink Robotics is making actual, for-sale robots as opposed to research and PR-driven products like Honda’s ASIMO. The company even sells accessories and extended warranties.
On Baxter’s wrist is a pair of buttons, and above that is a touch-sensitive panel right where you would naturally grab the wrist. Gripping the wrist puts Baxter’s arm in power assist mode, allowing you to freely move the heavy arm around with just two fingers. When the touch panel is activated, Baxter stops what it is doing, and the head whips around to see what you are going to show it. The two buttons work out to “Save arm position” and “activate grasper.” So to unload stacked items in a box, just grab the arm and put it on top of the stack, hit the arm button to pick something up, move the arm over to the table/conveyor belt/whatever, and then press the arm button again to release the item. Do this for each item in the box, and Baxter will be able to handle every other box from here on out.
This is the basic pick aIn “run mode” Baxter’s screen shows face, but when it’s time to teach Baxter something, the face moves out of the way and the teaching interface pops up. The two large, grey circles are the wingspan of each arm, the smaller circles are the shoulders, and the plus signs are the hands. The up and down arrows indicate picking something up and putting something down, and everything is color coded blue and yellow for the left and right arms, respectively. In the first screen, Baxter is going to pick up something on its right and put the item down in front of it. Baxter is going to do this 50 times, as indicated by the 0/50.
The interface doesn’t take long to get used to, and you can copy and paste commands, change the order of commands, and edit already-entered commands for some fine turning. Baxter even has an I/O port for communication with other factory machinery. This allows Baxter to wait until another machine is ready or directly manipulate another machine, like a press or cutter.
As we said before, the screen isn’t touch sensitive, so all of the input is done via a little control panel on Baxter’s forearm or side. The round control in the center is a jog dial, twisting it will cycle through options, and pressing down on it will select the option. Above that is a back button and below it is a home button. It’s simple and easy to use.
If you’re wondering what the big camera on the head is for, we asked. Believe it or not, it currently doesn’t do anything. Rethink Robotics said it would gladly activate the camera if one of its customers requested it, but no one has needed it yet.
Baxter’s software is a proprietary OS developed by Rethink Robotics, but there is also a research version that will run ROS, the open source Robotic Operating System.
While the screen would have you believe Baxter’s eyes are on its face, they’re really in its hands. Right next to the hand mount point is an array of sensors that is always pointed at the item Baxter is picking up or holding, so the robot will know if it runs out of items or drops something. Rethink sells a vacuum cup hand for gripping flat objects and parallel gripper hand for everything else. The company also said customers often attach their own proprietary hands (“end effectors,” in robot-industry-speak) to Baxter, all of which interface with the robot just fine. Common aftermarket customizations are things like multi-suction cup hands for lifting bigger objects or multiple objects at once.
Part of what makes Baxter so unique is that it can safely work alongside humans. While there were tons of factory robots at the show, most of them were dangerous, dumb monsters that had to be sectioned off from humans with protective barriers. Baxter was built from the ground up to be safe. If Baxter’s arm feels resistance from hitting an object (like a human) it will stop. Several times Baxter’s handlers would walk in front of the robot and get hit by the arm, and it wasn’t a big deal—just a light shove.
All of the joints have been designed to not pinch fingers, and even if Baxter suddenly loses power, the gearing in the arms will provide enough resistance that the arms will slowly come to a rest.
Just in case things do go bad though, Baxter is equipped with a big, red, slammable stop button. Seemingly every automated thing at ATX East had one of these, so it’s good to know we’ll be able to shut down the robot uprising as soon as it starts.
Above the head is a beacon with a green light to indicate everything is a-OK. This light is highest up on the robot for easy status assessment on the busy factory floor. Below the light is a ring of motion sensors, which detect when a person is nearby and where they are in relation to a robot. We were told that Baxter doesn’t really change its behavior when it detects a person, the amber lights next to each sensor just light up so the human knows Baxter can see them. Presumably, these sensors could allow Baxter to be programmed to act differently when a person is around, but the robot is already so safe that it isn’t currently necessary.
Welcome to the future
Like Rethink Robotics’ close cousin, iRobot, the company is successful because it is applying robotics in a practical, easy-to-use, and cost-effective way. The $25,000 price might seem high, but it is staggeringly cheap compared to other robots in this form factor, namely the $280,000 Willow Garage PR2. While the PR2 is a do-it-all research bot built for complete autonomy, Rethink keeps things cheap and simple by coming up with a market they want to serve and building to fill that need. While the PR2 is a monster autonomous processing platform consisting of two quad-core i7 Xeon processors, 24GB of RAM, and powered by 16 laptop batteries, Baxter, because it is just a mimic, runs on desktop-class hardware. It also completely skips the PR2′s insane battery loadout by requiring to be plugged in—electricity is never a problem at a factory.
As a result of the low price, Baxter isn’t your typical pie-in-the-sky robot that will never be a successful product. It was amazing just hanging around the Baxter booth and hearing the stream of factory owners seriously enquiring about putting the robot to work. The Baxter reps seemed to have an answer for everything the potential customers brought up, and Baxter looked like a mature platform that was the result of a lot of back and forth with actual factory owners.
Yes, the sad part of the equation is that Baxter will (and already has) put some factory workers out of a job. Economic impact is an inevitable part of the endless march of technology. Just as the Internet put librarians out of work, and the automobile killed most of the horse industry, factory workers can be displaced by robots. While checking out Baxter at ATX East, we even heard an attendee ask “So I can fire four workers and put this guy on the line?” New industries always bring new jobs though, so just as computers and cars have employed millions, robots likely will too.
It’s natural to call a manufacturing robot “the factory worker of the future,” but Baxter is out working at several factories right now. And we swear the company made a few sales while we were training the robot at the show. So, perhaps, it’s better to call Baxter “the factory robot of the present.”
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