MIT professor emeritus Rodney Brooks gained fame during the 1990s for co-founding iRobot, an MIT spin-off that brought the Roomba and other innovative, helpful robots to the world. He’s since moved on to robots that are bigger, but no less revolutionary.

Brooks’ newest startup, Rethink Robotics, headquartered in Boston, is producing robots that can work safely in factories alongside humans and demonstrate “common sense,” adapting to their tasks and environment.

Rethink’s first commercial model, Baxter, released in January 2013, 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.

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