Rodney Brooks who founded Rethink Robotics has definately an interesting story. Especially knowing that Rethink Robotics had initially raised money from Jeff Bezos, Goldman Sachs, something like 150M I believe. But despite all those high profile backers, it had to shut down in late 2018 i believe and was acquired by the Hahn Group, a German automation company.
I worked at a robotics startup for a while developing a robotic arm. The big problem we kept coming up against was that the robot was just part of the story. A robot arm doesn't solve a customers problem - a robotic solution does. Programming robotics is effectively software development - it requires logical thinking, branching logic, variables and often ends up being quite complex. It's a similar problem to no-code and visual programming - the complexity of software development isn't in the medium of code, but the constructing of logical systems.<p>The robot arm then becomes a piece of a much larger engineering puzzle - and so the people using it need to be highly technical. All the "user friendly" gimmicks are just obstacles in their way.
This is a great article. I always wondered why they didn't succeed. I remember wanting to apply for a job there, as they were apparently developing a visual programming environment to program the robots. But that ended up being right before they closed their doors.
The lab i works had had a rethink robot for research purposes. It seem to be part of a wave of consumer-facing robots that have all since folded. With the exception of Waymo, DJI, and skydio. You have to remember at the time eveyone was searching for the next big computing platform, and it wasn’t that clear the iPhone would be it. After the iPhone succeeded, hardware investors became even more convinced, especially when money was cheap.
I saw one of those Baxter robots when Steve Jervitson gave us a tour of DFJ, also got to see all his Apollo stuff.<p>It seemed like a nice cobot, but with no real practical profitable application