
Rod Brooks Reveals Baxter, Programmable Industrial Robot for the Masses - robertbud1
http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2012/09/18/rod-brooks-and-rethink-reveal-an-industrial-robot-for-the-masses/
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beambot
As a professional roboticist, this is really exciting. It could have an even
bigger impact that the Kinect (and other depth sensors). For the last few
decades, actuators have been the dominant cost of building such a robot.
Comparable arms routinely cost ~$100k (from the PR2, Meka, ABB, Barrett, Kuka,
etc). Essentially, Baxter represents a 10x cost savings, taking the per-arm
cost from ~$100k to ~$10k each.

Actually... Rod is my "academic grandfather." Yesterday I had the opportunity
to interview him for Hizook's feature article:

[http://www.hizook.com/blog/2012/09/18/baxter-robot-
rethink-r...](http://www.hizook.com/blog/2012/09/18/baxter-robot-rethink-
robotics-finally-unveiled)

 __So much for yesterday's HN frontpage article about hardware being dead...

~~~
hpguy
Don't want to nitpick, but the article says "Baxter will sell for $22,000, not
including its base and hands, but including a software subscription and
warranty." So not really a 10x cost saving.

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tocomment
Wow that's really cool. How far away are we from having one of these do
dishes?

~~~
unwind
Optimized high-performance robots for washing dishes, adapted to the consumer
environment, have been available for almost a century. They're called, quite
aptly, dishwashers.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Ok, when will it load and unload the dishes?

~~~
moconnor
Get two dishwashers and put your clean dishes in one of them.

Put a sticker on it marked "clean". Need a plate? Take it out of the "clean"
dishwasher. Got a dirty plate? Put it into the other dishwasher. Other
dishwasher full? Turn it on and move the "clean" sticker to that one.

Double buffering with dishwashers turns them into magic cupboards. I don't
know why most kitchens only come with one.

~~~
anamax
> Put a sticker on it marked "clean".

The sticker/magnet doesn't work.

What works is maintaining the invariant "if the door is locked, the dishes
inside are clean". If you open a locked door, you either empty the dishwasher
or relock the door.

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raintrees
Single page: [http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2012/09/18/rod-brooks-and-
reth...](http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2012/09/18/rod-brooks-and-rethink-
reveal-an-industrial-robot-for-the-masses/?single_page=true)

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tmuir
The $22K price is for an incomplete system. The two missing pieces (hands and
base) sound pretty integral to the system as well. What is the point of
listing a price of a useless configuration?

~~~
francoisferland
End effectors depends on the task, many are already available on the market.
Some applications might not even require an active end effector at all. Same
thing with the platform. Research labs who want to explore user interaction
with safe, compliant arms without designing their own now have a much cheaper
option that before.

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ZoFreX
Unrelated to the content but if you do insist on chunking your articles up
into pages, at least break them at paragraph boundaries! Or even sentence
boundaries - breaking them mid-sentence is atrocious.

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agumonkey
The reverse sensor programming reminds me of cg animation auto-keyframing.

~~~
ZoFreX
Yes, it is presumably doing some inverse kinematics in there somewhere. I
wonder how they stabilised it.

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tocomment
Does anyone know how the arms are designed? Do they just have big servos?

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fluxon
Missed opportunity: name it Dexter.

