Baxter – The Working Robot
Baxter is the first product of
Rethink Robotics, which is an ambitious start-up company that aims to
revolutionize the industrial robots that work in factories around the world. Baxter comes
encased in plastic and is relatively slow and imprecise in the way it moves, as
well as being built with elaborate array of safety mechanisms and sensors to
protect the human workers it assists. In other words; Baxter is created to work
together with humans. The robot will come equipped with a library of simple
tasks, or behaviors. For example that it must have an object in its hands
before it can move and release it. The robot fits roughly into a human – sized
space and can perform common tasks that once were to trivial for automation,
example adding instruction manuals to boxes. In contrast to the fixed
repetitive tasks performed by today’s robot arms and hands, scientists at the
University of California, San Diego and the University of Washington have built
several prototype hands with pliable fingers that can move as quickly as the
humans
The robot is estimated to cost about
$22,000 but on the other hand it is estimated that the robots can work for the
equivalent of about $4 an hour.
Although Baxter will replace human
labor, the employees that are being replaced will not be laid of, but instead
resigned to jobs that require higher-level skills.
Baxter is a multi purpose robot that
of course doesn’t ever get sick, nor does it need toilet breaks and it can be
trained and retrained by anyone. Baxter can be trained to do new actions just
by moving its arms to the correct position and choosing an action. In this way
any workers can make the robot useful to themselves or adjust it to new environment.
By Lise Ulrikke Johansen Vaage
No comments:
Post a Comment