BOSTON — If you grab the hand of a two-armed robot named Baxter, it will turn its head and a pair of cartoon eyes — displayed on a tablet-size computer-screen “face” — will peer at you with interest.

The sensation that Baxter conveys is not creepy, but benign, perhaps even disarmingly friendly. And that is intentional.

Baxter, the first product of Rethink Robotics, an ambitious start-up company in a revived manufacturing district here, is a significant bet that robots in the future will work directly with humans in the workplace.

That is a marked shift from today’s machines, which are kept safely isolated from humans, either inside glass cages or behind laser-controlled “light curtains,” because they move with Terminator-like speed and accuracy and could flatten any human they encountered.