Heartland Robotics : Low Cost Industrial Robots Revolution


Rodney Brooks, co-founder and CTO of iRobot, is leaving his iRobot post to found his own robotics company, Heartland Robotics.

Heartland Robotics, based in Cambridge, Mass., will focus on the manufacture of industrial worker robots.

“I want to effect a powerful evolution in the world’s labor markets, and my current focus is to develop low-cost robots that will empower American workers,” Brooks said in a statement released on his personal Web site.

Rodney Brooks new work talks about “I want to effect a powerful evolution in the world’s labor markets, and my current focus is to develop low-cost robots that will empower American workers” which is the same as Heartland Robotics. The new work is focused on the Obrero robot.

The Obrero robot page

Obrero is a humanoid robot especialized in sensitive manipulation: manipulation that is as much about perception as action and is intrinsically responsive to the properties of the object being manipulated; manipulation that does not rely on vision as the main sensor but as a complement.

This work is being done by Eduardo Torres-Jara and supervised by Prof. Rodney A. Brooks.

FURTHER READING
There are currently over 1 million industrial robots in the world

Rodney Brooks at wikipedia

Rodney Brooks at MIT

Used industrial robot arms in the $9000-15000 range