Hardware

Baxter

Baxter is a dual-arm collaborative robot introduced by Rethink Robotics, the company co-founded by Rodney Brooks, in 2012, featuring two seven-degree-of-freedom arms with series elastic actuators, a screen face for conveying state, and demonstration-by-guiding programming aimed at small manufacturers. Commercially it struggled against faster, more precise competitors and Rethink closed in 2018, but Baxter and its one-armed sibling Sawyer became fixtures of robot learning research labs.

Why it matters for physical AI

Baxter mainstreamed compliant, human-safe arms and hand-guided teaching, and as an affordable bimanual research platform it hosted a generation of early deep robot learning experiments before today's low-cost arms arrived.