"Rethink’s first commercial model, Baxter, released in January, is a human-sized, two-armed robot that can be programmed to learn repetitive production tasks: material handling, testing and sorting, light assembly, and packing and unpacking. Any worker, tech-savvy or not, can program Baxter by moving the robot’s arms — demonstrating the desired tasks and locations — and pressing buttons on a control panel.

“Baxter changes its movements to accommodate the world. That’s a revolution in robots for manufacturing by itself,” says Brooks, a former director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and now Rethink’s chief technology officer. “And the fact that it’s aware of people and safe to be around people is another revolution in the manufacturing environment.”

A Baxter-type robot first appealed to Brooks as a means of helping America compete with low-cost overseas labor and making its factories competitive globally. “I decided maybe I could do something with robots to make manufacturing more attractive in the United States,” he says."
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/rodney-brooks-rethink-robotics-0809.html