The Learning Loop

The Software Obsession

In 2008, Rodney Brooks (co-founder of iRobot) started a company called Heartland Robotics, later renamed Rethink Robotics. The pitch was the purest version of the software-first vision in modern robotics. A factory worker with no programming background would grab Baxter’s arm, physically guide it through a task, and Baxter would learn the motion by demonstration. The intelligence would live in the code, and the code would adapt.

Rethink raised roughly $150 million, shipped Baxter in 2012 and Sawyer in 2015, and shut down in October 2018. The learning algorithms worked. The hardware did not coöperate: the series elastic actuators that made Baxter safe to touch also made the arm too imprecise for the assembly-line work its customers actually needed done. Universal Robots ate the collaborative-robot market with stiffer joints and simpler software, as The Robot Report documented in detail at the time of the Rethink shutdown.