Rethink Robotics has new one arm bot Sawyer that is smaller, faster and more precise than Baxter

Rethink Robotics' new robot arm, Sawyer, is a high performance robot designed for machine tending and other precise application. Hundreds of Baxter robots have been sold. Sawyer has pre-sales in the hundreds. There are other robotic systems with higher sales volume. Rethink Robotic systems are leaders in usability and safety.

Rethink Robotics today provided an exciting glimpse into the future of collaborative robotics with the introduction of Sawyer™, a single-arm, high-performance robot designed to execute machine tending, circuit board testing and other precise tasks that have historically been impractical to automate with traditional industrial robots. Sawyer is a significant addition to the company’s smart, collaborative robot family, which also includes the groundbreaking Baxter™ robot that defined the category of safe, interactive, affordable automation.

Sawyer offers the same highly-touted safety, compliance and usability advantages of Baxter – including the iconic “face” screen, embedded sensors and train-by-demonstration user interface – while providing the smaller footprint and high precision performance needed for tasks that require significant agility and flexibility. In addition, Sawyer runs on the Intera™ software system, the same extensible platform that powers Baxter, so it works like humans do by dynamically adapting to real-world conditions on the plant floor and integrating seamlessly into existing work cells. Together, Baxter and Sawyer can address many of the estimated 90 percent of manufacturing tasks that cannot be feasibly automated with traditional solutions today.

Weighing only 19 kg (42 lbs), Sawyer features a 4kg (8.8 lb) payload, with 7 degrees of freedom and a 1-meter reach that can maneuver into the tight spaces and varied alignments of work cells designed for humans. Its high-resolution force sensing, embedded at each joint, enables Rethink Robotics’ compliant motion control, which allows the robot to “feel” its way into fixtures or machines, even when parts or positions vary. This enables an adaptive precision that is unique to the robotics industry and allows Sawyer to work effectively in semi-structured environments. In addition, Sawyer features an embedded vision system, which includes a camera in its head to perform applications requiring a wide field of view and a Cognex camera with a built-in light source in its wrist for precision vision applications. Sawyer’s vision system enables the Robot Positioning System for dynamic re-orientation, and over time will support more advanced features that are inherent to the Cognex system, such as barcode scanning and object recognition.

The arm actuators have been redesigned. Baxter uses springs made out of “C”-shaped pieces of steel. Sawyer uses titanium S shaped springs. The spring redesign and cables through the joints allowed Sawyer’s arm to be smaller, faster and more precise.



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