Rodney Brooks' Robust AI deploys Carter, a collaborative warehouse robot built around humans
MIT News AI · rss · 2026-11-13
Robust AI, founded in 2019 by MIT professor emeritus and iRobot co-founder Rodney Brooks with Anthony Jules, builds Carter, a mobile collaborative robot for warehouses and factories. Resembling a utility cart, Carter features a force-sensitive handlebar, AI vision, and holonomic wheels, letting humans redirect it one-handed, interrupt it, or guide it by gesture and touchscreen.
- Philosophy: complement rather than replace humans — most factories will never rip out operations for $50–200M automation systems, so robots must phase into existing workflows.
- Deployments: Carter robots already move goods in logistics warehouses and factory floors, where workers can walk 30,000 steps a day; robots handle the 400-foot hauls.
- Lesson: a hospital robot study found machines abandoned because they blocked nurses' gurneys — shaping the company's principle of deeply understanding workers' primary tasks before building features.
Brooks directed MIT CSAIL (1997–2007) and previously co-founded iRobot and Rethink Robotics.
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