Rodney Brooks, RethinkRobotics founder and former director of the MIT Computer and Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, said he hoped Baxter represented a "new concept in manufacturing".
Its makers, RethinkRobotics, say it can apply common sense, adapt to its environment and be trained in less than 30 minutes to complete specific tasks, by workers without robotic expertise.
Both RethinkRobotics and Universal Robots, have focused on selling to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and both had big crowds of interested prospects at the recent Automate 2013 show in Chicago.