02 September 2008

Heartland Robotics ~ Leveraging Laborers for Robofacturing?

Big news in the Boston-metro robocluster: iRobot co-founder and roboguru at MIT, Professor Rodney Brooks has teamed up with Ken Zolot to found Heartland Robotics, an automation enterprise building industrial and workplace robots to boost U.S. competitiveness. See Scott Kirsner's Innovation Economy column this past Sunday, Robots On The Move, in which he mentions Heartland (as well as spotlighting newco's Harvest and NorthEnd). The xconomy.com story IRobot Co-Founder Brooks Leaves to Launch New Robotics Firm Aiming to Revitalize U.S. Workforce quotes Rod Brooks saying...
Heartland Robotics is combining the power of computation—embodied in robots—and the extraordinary intelligence of the American workforce, to rehumanize and revitalize manufacturing.
On the other hand, you could be a skeptic like me who thinks that mass-ufacturing should be automagic -- and robotified -- and people freed from toil and empowered to do primarily custom and creative activities. Or maybe that's what Heartland will do?

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