A Boston Firm Returns to Market with Human-Collaborative Industrial Robots Six Years After Bankruptcy
Six years ago, Boston-based Rethink Robotics went bankrupt while attempting to sell industrial robots that could work alongside humans.
But now Rethink is back. The once-promising company has been acquired by a German industrial firm and returned to Boston, ready to launch new collaborative robots, or “cobots,” which bear little resemblance to Rethink’s original machines.
“We are currently looking for a space that can serve as home for our employees,” said Julia Astrid Riemenschneider, Vice President of Business Development at United Robotics Group, Rethink’s parent company. For now, Rethink has set up offices in the MassRobotics innovation center within Seaport District and is hiring for positions in robotics technology and software development.
Rethink was once a hot project. Founded in 2008 as Heartland Robotics, it raised $150 million from investors including General Electric, Goldman Sachs, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Its co-founder Rodney Brooks, a professor at MIT and also the co-founder of iRobot—the first company to profit by selling automatic vacuum cleaners to consumers—was behind its creation. (Brooks declined to comment.)
Based partly on Brooks’ research at MIT, Rethink developed robotic arms equipped with motors that would stop immediately upon encountering an obstacle, making it safe for the robots to work alongside humans. The company built two robot systems based on this technology.
However, industrial customers were unsatisfied. They wanted to use Rethink’s robotic arms for precise operations such as welding, metal cutting, machine assembly, or packaging finished goods. The safety mechanisms in Rethink’s robots included shock-absorbing springs to mitigate the impact of accidental collisions. Unfortunately, these springs caused slight flexing in the robot arm, making it insufficiently accurate for many industrial tasks.
Meanwhile, numerous other companies came up with more successful designs. Among them was industry leader Universal Robots, a Danish company owned by North Reading-based Teradyne. Since its founding in 2005, Universal Robots has sold over 75,000 collaborative robots.
By 2018, Rethink had run out of both funding and customers. The company sold its intellectual property to Germany’s Hahn Group, which formed United Robotics Group to market cobots.
“We saw the potential in these [Rethink] robots that were indeed different from others at the time,” said Riemenschneider. But when United tried to promote these robots, they encountered the same issues as Rethink had faced. “We immediately knew this product was not robust enough for industrial environments,” she added.
As a result, the company created an entirely new product line and unveiled it at a robotics trade show in Chicago last week. The new products include an independent robotic arm and an autonomous vehicle equipped with a mechanical arm on top that can move between different workstations within a factory. It is designed for various tasks from inventory handling to mechanical assembly.
Riemenschneider stated that Rethink’s robots will be manufactured in Germany, but she also noted that if the demand for these robots is high enough, final assembly might eventually take place in the United States.
Source: BostonGlobe.com
