I sold Baxter and Sawyer robots. They were shit. The creators had no idea about market fit. You’re selling this thing to controls and automation engineers who are familiar with programming on PCs and pendants. ReThink had this ridiculous face for “emotional feedback” that forced you to also do all your programming there. It was clunky and kinda cheap (Sawyer was upgraded, and more solid). Baxter was slow with terrible repeatability. And it did not come with native ports for external controls or communication. There was no way to integrate with an existing automated system, no digital IOs or Ethernet. You had to get a third party distributor to manufacture at their panel shop and jury rig something together for extra cost.

Not to mention that UX was terrible and clunky and not intuitive. It’s suppose to be easy to use, easy to program, that anyone can just role it up to an existing operators position and teach it in five minutes and you’re up and running. Wrong.

As mentioned, the only interface was the obnoxious swivel screen, and the only programming controls were... dials with a push button, one located on each arm and one on the back. Yes, you had to scroll through menus and across pages to select and modify programs in endlessly confusing menus that literally made you regret ever getting involved with the company.

Yes, it had some nice collaborative safety features built in, some patented titanium s joints that flexed for safety like tendons yet maintained nice accuracy.

But no one cares about your fancey safety features if it’s nearly impossible to use, and fails to seamlessly integrate into existing systems.

This is a classic mistake. Build something epically fancy, but totally worthless to 90% of the people that would use it, because it just doesn’t play well. Learning curve is too high. It’s not plug and play/ fails to understand industry compatibility requirements, or it’s too niche.

Because I sold these things, I quickly learned they were terrible.

However, Universal Robots were on the right track from the get go. They were coming from the industrial automation world, they understood market fit. They made a device that was easy to use, intuitive, that leveraged existing programming methods and incorporated some collaborative programming technology in tandem. Maybe their gear mechanisms weren’t as safe, but they passed all the requirements, so what did it matter in the end? Fancy safety joints were NOT the most important selling point for collaborative robots. Reducing downtime to increase output and profits is, and that means easy integration and quick programming. Not to mention UR was just a robot arm, and not this wacky monstrosity of a machine and wheeled based (which was optional for ReThink but not really). And UR was super compatible. It was basically like conventional single arm robot with servos slowed down and given fancy torque feedback algorithms and some sensors for safety and tracking.

The guys who started ReThink were out of their depth. Just some academics who had some success making commercial robots who expected an entire industry to conform to their fanciful dreams of robots with dopey emoting faces working along side their human comrads.

Just pissed money away.

And the thing is, they were one of the first, and positioned to be one of the best. Collaborative robotics is a massively growing field as humans and machines work in ever closer proximity.

But ReThink totally choked. Had the wrong design engineers, with no industry experience. They failed to understand industry needs and existing automation culture and prevailing systems infrastructure.

This company is a classic case study on how to completely botch the opportunity of a lifetime because of failing to understand existing market fit.