Smarter, Safer Robot Could Give U.S. Manufacturers Major Advantage
Company hopes its human-like robot will make it more competitive to do low-cost goods in the U.S.
BY JEFFREY BAUSCH
Electronic Products
Boston-based company Rethink Robotics has unveiled a new “human-like” robot that they believe will help improve domestic production for U.S. manufacturers.
Robot is specially designed to be highly efficient at performing simple manufacturing tasks. (Via: technologyreview.com)
“It’s aimed at making it more competitive to do low-cost goods in the U.S., rather than outsourcing them to China,” company co-founder Rodney Brooks said. “That was my motivation.”
Meet “Baxter”
The robot, named “Baxter”, offers tremendous flexibility in terms of the range of production-related jobs it can perform.
Baxter has two arms — each equipped with a two-finger gripper — and can be used to do all sorts of repetitive tasks. When it comes to programming the bot to do the job, its face doubles as a computer screen to make setting things up quick and easy.
An up-close view of the Baxter robot.
“Ordinary factory workers can program it to do a task in a few minutes without any training themselves,” Brooks said. “The idea here is to bring to the factory floor the ease of use that we have been putting in our personal computers and our smart phones and iPads, which we haven’t brought to industrial equipment.”
A good fit for Baxter would be a manufacturer that needs to take items off a conveyor belt and pack them into boxes. To teach Baxter to recognize something, a worker needs only to hold the object in front of one of its cameras, which are located in the head, in the chest, and at the end of each arm. To teach it to pick something up, a worker simply guides the bot’s arms through the desired motion and selects from a number of preprogrammed actions using a pair of dial controls found in each forearm to specifically tell it what it to do.
It’s “smart” in that sense, though Brooks says it’s not “ultra-intelligent”; that is, it comes with “enough intelligence to be useful,” he said.
“It’s got these little pieces of common sense,” Brooks adds. “In a traditional industrial robot, you need to put in the common sense from scratch.”
Baxter requires no cage or barrier from its human coworkers: it moves too slowly and gently to cause any sort of physical harm, and an array of sonar sensors positioned around its head can detect human movement. What’s more, the bot also reacts to sudden change in force that occurs with an unexpected impact and responds by stopping its job instantly.
A better option (finally)
Baxter will cost a company $22,000 to purchase. This is a huge difference when compared to conventional industrial robots which, according to Brooks, cost anywhere between $50,000 and $100,000.
Adding to the financial headache are timing issues associated with ordering a more conventional industrial robot: it can take up to 18 weeks for delivery and require help from a systems integrator as well as a redesign of the factory floor.
Baxter, on the other hand, can be brought to the factory and less than an hour after delivery, be fully programmed and out on the floor doing actual work.
Keeping it in America
Orders have already been placed for Baxter and deliveries are expected to go out starting October 1. The bot’s being manufactured entirely in the States, with its components coming from contract manufacturers around the country.
When it comes to taking away jobs from human workers, Brooks says not to worry: “The robot doesn’t do the whole task — it does the dull repetitive ones, and lets the person do the higher-value stuff,” he said.
Check out video of Baxter in action below:
Video
Check out video of Baxter in action below:
Good timing
The introduction of Baxter comes at a good time, as manufacturers are starting to feel the financial pressure of rising labor costs in China. This has served as an encouragement to U.S. manufacturers to keep or otherwise return product operations back to the U.S.
Brooks adds that Baxter will be authorized for sale only in the U.S. and Canada at first, saying that the North American market is “so big that we can have explosive growth for years before we have to go elsewhere.”
To date, Rethink Robotics has raised over $62 million in venture capital from Sigma Partners, Charles River Ventures, Highland Capital Partners, Draper Fisher Jurveston and Bezos Expeditions, the personal investment company of Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. The company employs 70 full-time workers at its South Boston facility.
Learn more at rethinkrobotics.com ?
Story via: masshightech.com
Learn more about Jeff Bausch.
More labor saving technology for the capitalist class to own and profit from. Come on people, it’s not so much about the tools, it’s about who owns them and who doesn’t. Perhaps robots like this could help a U.S. company compete with foreign wage slaves for a little while, but as soon as the robots (or knock-offs of them) make their way around the global market we’ll be right back in the same sinking boat, only minus the workers the robots replaced.
We have more than enough labor saving technology as it is, global unemployment numbers can testify to that, what we really need is some innovation in the circuit diagram of crapitalism itself. We need a cooperative economy with mutual ownership of capital resources. Kudos to Schweickart in that regard.
The point is that the growing organic composition of capital, ie robotics, is a law of capitalism. The solution lies not in trying to block it, but by ‘breaking on through to the other side’, ie, socialism, where we can use it to shorten the working day for all but still maintain decent incomes.
Yes – for a view on how greater efficient mechanisation could be part of a different politico-economic future, drawing on Keynes “the economic problems of our grandchildren” from the 1930s, see http://www.aeonmagazine.com/living-together/john-quiggin-keynesian-utopiav1/ .
(Quiggin is an economist often fairly centre-left, but he’s seeming to point beyond a social-democratic frame in this essay).
Of course, as previous commenter points out, under globalised neoliberalism employment-reducing tech is generally _bad_. And in the context of this site, its interesting in that “green” jobs like running windfarms and re-weatherizing buildings are often touted as more employment-dense than their fossil-fuel equivalents.
So maybe the future hopeful economy is one where there’s still plenty of work to be done – just that it’s not manufacturing, but in greening our homes, managing our neighbourhood energy systems and aquaculture ponds etc. Half-way between Transition Towns and Bucky Fuller’s 9 chains to the moon
The only way to break through to the other side is to organically grow a mutually owned economy in which the division of capital coincides with the division of labor. Any other social arrangement requires a proletariat or its equivalent, and in Engels’ own words: “Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat.”
Technological innovation has never mattered as much as distribution of POWER over the means of production, in whatever form they happen to take.
If workers own or lease their factories and run them–one worker, one share, one vote–they are no longer wage labor. They aren’t paid a wage, but a portion of the profit determined by them. There is no ‘labor cost’ in the firm’s expense column. The worker-owners or worker-leasors are what Marx called ‘the associated producers’. As technological improvements increase their productivity, they can shrink their working day, theoretically toward zero. That’s how the abolition or withering away of ALL classes is projected.
Right, except for the working day being a theoretical zero. Physics and biology prevent that, for the portion of society doing the work, that is.
I don’t need a lesson in Marx or general economics. My only reason for posting was frustration over an article about even more labor saving technology when we don’t need it. What we need is a different distribution of power over capital. That’s it and that’s all.
It approaches zero, it never actually gets there.
But the thing for you to see more clearly is how the ‘different distribution of power’ with labor sovereign over capital, as well as more equitable, is tied to an ecological and sustainable technical development of the productive forces. The Mondragon coops are a case in point. They have redistributed power, but they also have some of the most modern and pleasant workplaces in Europe.