BOSTON—Rethink Robotics, the pioneering manufacturer of the Baxter and Sawyer collaborative robots, closed for business Oct. 3, just 10 years after it started.
Rethink Robotics was co-founded by Rodney Brooks and Ann Whittaker in 2008. Before starting Rethink, Brooks was a professor of robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and former director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He was also the founder and former chief technical officer of iRobot, the maker of the Roomba home vacuum-cleaning robot.