NEW YORK—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.

One of the coolest things about Baxter is that anyone can use it. The bot can be trained to do a task without ever needing to call in a software engineer. You teach Baxter how to do something by grabbing an arm and showing it what you want, sort of like how you would teach a child to paint.

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.









In "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.