Well, it comes with a proprietary firmware, which completely kills my interest.
Will Baxter be the Model T of the robotics industry?
11–18 of 18 posts
Re: Will Baxter be the Model T of the robotics industry?
#12As someone who watches far too much "How It's Made" and other engineering porn, one of the things you start to notice is the amount of 'human glue' logic in production processes.
Whenever there's a weird-shaped widget that needs to be inserted into a die at a funny angle, or some apparently trivial decision needs to be made, there's probably some poor bastard zoned into a hypnotic trance of 12 hour shifts putting tab A into slot B with the mild spice of danger that OSHA-minimum safety guards never really quells completely.
Of those jobs, it seems on casual inspection that a surprisingly high percentage exist because some process engineer has cranked the numbers, and it's cheaper to get a human to do it than put the dev + maint time into an automatic solution.
At USD22k, these things have got to be cheaper than even just wages for a single min-wage worker for a year, you might even throw 10-20k at consultants to customise it for you as well (and if there's a strong SDK/plugins market, plugin+custom is waaaay cheaper than full-custom)
This could end up being the Manufacturing equivalent of a CMS.
Re: Will Baxter be the Model T of the robotics industry?
#13As someone who watches far too much "How It's Made" and other engineering porn, one of the things you start to notice is the amount of 'human glue' logic in production processes. Whenever there's a weird-shaped widget that needs to be inserted into a die at a funny angle, or some apparently trivial decision needs to be made, there's probably some poor bastard zoned into a hypnotic trance of 12 hour shifts putting tab…
"or some apparently trivial decision needs to be made"
There be dragons. Those apparently trivial decisions, even if they are truly trivial for humans, can be Ph.D. subjects, or worse, to have them done by robots.
For example, suppose a batch of wrongly colored parts enters the system. A dumb robotic system probably would happily build red cars with yellow left front doors forever.
Re: Will Baxter be the Model T of the robotics industry?
#14As someone who watches far too much "How It's Made" and other engineering porn, one of the things you start to notice is the amount of 'human glue' logic in production processes. Whenever there's a weird-shaped widget that needs to be inserted into a die at a funny angle, or some apparently trivial decision needs to be made, there's probably some poor bastard zoned into a hypnotic trance of 12 hour shifts putting tab…
"or some apparently trivial decision needs to be made" There be dragons. Those apparently trivial decisions, even if they are truly trivial for humans, can be Ph.D. subjects, or worse, to have them done by robots. For example, suppose a batch of wrongly colored parts enters the system. A dumb robotic system probably would happily build red cars with yellow left front doors forever.
Or glass in a packet or crisps or something.
Re: Will Baxter be the Model T of the robotics industry?
#15Tweet Rodney Brooks has been working in the field of robotics since the 1970s and is email ThisBlog this!share to TwitterShare to Facebook
That's how the first line looks to me.
Designing a web site template? Don't do that.
Re: Will Baxter be the Model T of the robotics industry?
#16I'm actually much more interested in another trend, represented by MasterCAM's RobotMaster software, that allows CNC machinists/programmers to program robots in the way they do machine tools.
It's a very different approach, but it means that the end-user (machinist) has the ability to know/control his whole stack to a far greater degree than the black-box & magic approach that ReThink is taking with Baxter. For industries that pride themselves on optimizing details - I think the RobotMaster is quite interesting.
Re: Will Baxter be the Model T of the robotics industry?
#17I've seen a couple Baxter videos now and it seems that the robot works very slowly. I understand that it has built in safety to slow down when it sees that there are people around, but I'd love to see it doing something useful at full speed to see how efficient it is. Surely they've tested that.
Speed isn't the main aim of this. Industrial robotics has an arms race in speed and precision but this is instead a beginning of an arms race in "common sense" abilities, robots that can do the work of humans without specialized programming. It already seems to operate at human worker speed.
It probably depends on the task, but from the videos I've seen Baxter seems an order of magnitude slower than a human worker. It looks like Baxter takes several seconds to manipulate an object, but the workers sorting fruit in this video, for example, are doing several manipulations per second.
Re: Will Baxter be the Model T of the robotics industry?
#18I've seen a couple Baxter videos now and it seems that the robot works very slowly. I understand that it has built in safety to slow down when it sees that there are people around, but I'd love to see it doing something useful at full speed to see how efficient it is. Surely they've tested that.
I think part of the problem with those demos is that perhaps the robot detects humans in the room and I keep reading from their press releases that they do indeed slow down when humans are near and stop entirely when very close.