Cobot maker Rethink Robotics closes

Rethink Robotics Inc., a company known for making collaborative robots Sawyer and Baxter abruptly shut down Oct. 3, leaving the injection molders who bought the expressive-faced "cobots" looking for alternatives.

Rethink Robotics introduced the two-armed Baxter in 2012 and began shipping them the following year. The single-arm Sawyer came out in 2015.

Collaborative robots can work side-by-side with human workers and need no special safety guarding. Baxter and Sawyer can sense when a worker is in the way and stop running. The screen faces of Baxter and Sawyer turn toward the person and change their expressions, raising their eyebrows or giving a quizzical look.

The face made the Rethink cobots immediately recognizable, even to people who know nothing about robots or manufacturing.

Prices were low, at around $20,000, encouraging molders to try them out. The camera-equipped robot arms can adjust how they grab objects in random patterns. They have a payload of only 5 pounds — making Baxter and Sawyer well-suited for taking plastic parts off a conveyor and putting them in a box. They are easy to program on the shop floor.

Some injection molders considered using the cameras in the arms for quality control inspection.

At Vanguard Plastics Corp., a custom molder in Southington, Conn., Baxters plays a key role in a quality check of an automotive part.

"We're using it for an integrated quality system," President Chris Budnick said. "Baxter takes the part from a person and puts it into a fixture, and based on the test, Baxter puts it in the good box or the bad box."

Budnick said that application does not use the robot-arm camera feature for inspection.

Vanguard Plastics, a small molder, has four Baxters. The company was a beta test site for Rethink Robotics.

Budnick read about Rethink's closing in the news. A week after is was first reported by The Robot Report on Oct. 3 — the day of the closing — Rethink's website still had no statement. Rethink Robotics did not respond to emails for this story.

Rethink CEO Scott Eckert told The Robot Report: "We were pioneers and innovators in the industry and responsible for the creation of the collaborative robot category, but unfortunately we didn't quite achieve the market success we had intended."

The Boston-based robot company was founded in 2008, by Rodney Brooks, a renowned MIT robotics pioneer.

The Boston Globe quoted a robotics expert who said the company ran into financial trouble when a major order from China failed to materialize. Other published reports suggested a sale of the company had fallen through, or that sales were not large enough to sustain the business.

Budnick, the Vanguard Plastics head, said he's glad his company bought the four Baxters. Is he disappointed that Rethink Robotics closed down?

"No way," he said. "Back in the very beginning we went in with both eyes open, and knowing that's an evolutionary process. There's going to be a lot of designs out there. Which companies are going to be the best, which designs are going to be the best, are going to get sorted out."

Budnick said a pioneer takes risks but does not always win out in the end. That's the case with collaborative robots, he said.

"They were the first of a new class and they did a good job at it. And generally, if you're the first one of a kind, you usually don't succeed," Budnick said. "They forced everybody to get better, is what they did. There will be bigger, deeper pockets that are better developed that will take the ideas and build on it."

Rethink Robotics faced growing competition in the collaborative robot space. Universal Robots, based in Odense, Denmark, has made inroads into the plastics processing market with a single-arm cobot. A German company called pi4 robotics GmbH sells the Workerbot, a two-arm cobot than has a face, a la Baxter. And established robot majors Kuka AG, ABB Ltd. and Fanuc Corp. are selling collaborative robots.

Budnick said Baxter got outpaced by the competition.

"Baxter was already not being supported because it was obsoleted," he said. "But for us, it works."

Baxter and Sawyer did make inroads into plastics manufacturing, especially injection molding. In addition to Vanguard Plastics, Plastics News stories reported that Rethink sold its collaborative robots to Koller Enterprises, Flambeau Inc., Donnelly Custom Molding Co., Rodon Group LLC and Nypro Inc.

Only Vanguard provided comments for this story. A spokeswoman for Rodon, in Hatfield, Pa., said the company didn't want to comment on Rethink Robotics, but added: "We had a great partnership with them early on and collaborated with them on some of the development of Baxter as well as mutual marketing efforts."

The other molders did not return a call or were not available.

Collaborative robots are becoming more widely used in other parts of the plastics industry, such as blow molding. Proco Machinery Inc., which makes automation and case packing systems for plastics packaging, demonstrated a Universal Robot putting blow molded bottles into a box at the Society of Plastics Engineers' Blow Molding Conference, held Oct. 8-10 in Pittsburgh.

Siva Krish, Proco's vice president of sales, said the Mississauga, Ontario-based automation company started using Universal Robots in 2015. About Rethink Robotics, he said, "It's very unfortunate. Nobody expected them to close down."

But Krish said Proco picked Universal over Rethink. "When we first started this process of using collaborative robots for packing the bottles, we had a conversation with Baxter [Rethink]," Krish said. "But we went to see a demonstration of their robots. We came to the conclusion it's not a good fit for blow molded packaging because the consistency and accuracy of the robot is not good."

Krish said he was told the Baxter would lose its accuracy after several hours and would have to be readjusted.

Budnick said that was not Vanguard Plastics' experience. Vanguard's Baxters ran hundreds of hours without having to be reset.

"The original one has 15,000 to 18,00 hours on it," he said. "It's a lot of hours."