RI Seminar: Rodney Brooks : A New Class of Industrial Robot

Rodney Brooks
Chairman and CTO, Rethink Robotics, Inc.
October 12, 2012
Abstract
At Rethink Robotics we have been developing a new class of industrial robot. The transition from mainframes to PCs completely transformed office work, and then transformed how we access information in our daily lives. With mainframes only specialists had direct access to computation. With the PC ordinary people were empowered to control computation and to use if for their own purposes. The Baxter robot is aimed at an analogous transformation from current industrial robots which are installed, integrated, and controlled by specialists, to a situation where anybody who can work on a factory floor can install a robot and have it doing useful work within an hour. The important metrics for this new class of robot are adaptability, flexibility, and ease of use. And low cost. This talk will show how we defined and drove the design of the robot and its own manufacture to these metrics.
Speaker Biography
Rodney Brooks is the Panasonic Professor of Robotics (emeritus) at MIT.
He is a robotics entrepreneur and Founder, Chairman and CTO of Rethink Robotics (formerly Heartland Robotics). He is also a Founder, former Board Member (1990 - 2011) and former CTO (1990 - 2008) of iRobot Corp (Nasdaq: IRBT). Dr. Brooks is the former Director (1997 - 2007) of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and then the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He received degrees in pure mathematics from the Flinders University of South Australia and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1981. He held research positions at Carnegie Mellon University and MIT, and a faculty position at Stanford before joining the faculty of MIT in 1984. He has published many papers in computer vision, artificial intelligence, robotics, and artificial life.
Dr. Brooks served for many years as a member of the International Scientific Advisory Group (ISAG) of National Information and Communication Technology Australia (NICTA), and on the Global Innovation and Technology Advisory Council of John Deere & Co. He is an currently Xconomist at Xconomy and a regular contributor to the Edge.
Dr. Brooks is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), a Founding Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (AAAS), a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (the other AAAS), a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a Corresponding Member of the Australian Academy of Science (AAS) and a Foreign Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE). He won the Computers and Thought Award at the 1991 IJCAI (International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence). He has been the Cray lecturer at the University of Minnesota, the Mellon lecturer at Dartmouth College, and the Forsythe lecturer at Stanford University. He was co-founding editor of the International Journal of Computer Vision and is a member of the editorial boards of various journals including Adaptive Behavior, Artificial Life, Applied Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Robots and New Generation Computing. He starred as himself in the 1997 Errol Morris movie "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control" named for one of his scientific papers, a Sony Classics picture, available on DVD.

[@Novoscreen]

OMG, souvenirs...I was so young, too young probabily, but I remember this talk who showed the important guidelines for this new class of robot: adaptability, flexibility, easy of use, and low cost, in the way of ours studies about emerging properties of decentralized intelligence: entomology and microrobotics.

[@vishalcful]

We have a new guy in town, Sawyer is a ground breaking technology for the Industrial revolution.
Rethink Robotics is awesome.

[@Magpie1701]

Great video, thanks for uploading!

[@louiseen9843]

YES! Good find!

[@MatthewJPrice]

You become an expert in an incredibly competitive field and then create a revolutionary device that is head and shoulders above any competitor. Once you've done that, then give lectures without talking about it ^^

[@OghamTheBold]

Is Baxter mute? Maybe consider him resounding - 'Need Input' - when anyone is confirmed to be in earshot (possibly mumbling 'Need Input' when uncertain) - plus the off switch should result in the plaintive cry - 'No disassemble'

[@TbiRobotics]

Very good!

[@leandroar12]

I was wondering about other ways for teaching tasks to the robot; wouldn't it be nice to use gloves with sensors? and maybe, also glasses with cameras; then the robot could analize the data and learn. I think this could be very usefull for complex tasks.
English is not my native language, I hope you can understand this comment.

[@BarkanUgurlu]

how many baxters are used to manufacture baxters? (none?)

[@TedRobotBuilder]

Hmm... a yacht steering robot... sounds like a good product to develop! XD

[@filix92]

He is basically selling his robot.

[@jay733]

I want a robot that is bullet proof and go chase and catch robbers

[@economist1026]

It would be good if you learned how to produce a youtube video before you try to make one. This production quality is abysmal!

[@lillapipet]

Worst movie ever