The Baxter robot is a standard research platform used widely in research tasks, supported with an SDK provided by the developers, Rethink Robotics. Despite the ubiquitous use of the robot, the official software support is sub-standard. Especially, the native IK service has a low success rate and is often inconsistent. This unreliable behavior makes Baxter difficult to use for experiments and the research community is in need of a more reliable software support to control the robot. We present our work towards creating a Python based software library supporting the kinematics and dynamics of the Baxter robot. Our toolbox contains implementation of pose and velocity kinematics with support for Jacobian operations for redundancy resolution. We present the implementation and performance of our library, along with a comparison with PyKDL. Keywords- Baxter Research Robot, Manipulator Kinematics, Iterative IK, Dynamical Model, Redundant Manipulator

Self-driving vehicles, small robots on production lines, drones flying rescue missions, even robots that keep older people company: these are some of the proposed, not-so futuristic, ways robots will aid us. But all those scenarios won't be possible without trust. Humans need to feel secure enough around robots and robotic systems to rely on them. "Building human-robot trust into autonomous robotic systems like self-driving vehicles is key to the systems' success," said Ryan Williams, a Virginia Tech assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering. "As we readily observe in human teams, collaboration without trust is often ineffective or even counterproductive," he said.

Brooks, the Chairman, and CTO of Rethink Robotics has stated that much of the misunderstanding has come from the overhyping of certain parts of AI, such as engines beating out professional players in video games like Dota 2 (OpenAI) and board games like Go. "An AI system can play chess fantastically, but it doesn't even know that it's playing a game," says Brooks, CTO of Rethink Robotics. When you see how a program learned something that a human can learn, you make the mistake of thinking it has the richness of understanding that you would have." Even then, for example, it took many attempts (around 459 attempts and 10, 000 hours of'AI' simulated gameplay) for OpenAI to beat a top e-sports team in a game of Dota 2. In the end, machine learning is usually a mundane task of using data to form patterns or understandings for the AI to do a specified job. To give an example, for computer vision, data needs to be'labeled'. This could be identifying cars within a photo (see the example below with vehicles).

The Evaluation Committee has completed the evaluations for the AI Time Journal TOP 25 Artificial Intelligence Companies 2019. The objective of the AI Time Journal TOP 25 Artificial Intelligence Companies 2019 Initiative is to give recognition and showcase AI companies for their contribution in 2019 to applying Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Deep Learning to solve significant and complex problems and improve people's lives in a multitude of domains including Healthcare, Education, Finance, Autonomous Vehicles and more. Note: companies that employ evaluation committee members have not been included in the evaluations. Alvin Foo: "The adoption of Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning and Machine Learning to facilitate human decision-making will continue to accelerate. While it creates opportunities to automate, it will also open up new challenges for IT team to address the potential increase in cyberattack. The advancement of AI provides a scalable cybersecurity solution for companies to automate and protect their IT assets. The future of cybersecurity will be AI-powered!"

A version of this article appears in the IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine (Volume 26, Issue 1, March 2019). In mid-November, we received the sad news that Alphabet is closing SCHAFT, a spinoff of the University of Tokyo robotics lab. The decision comes one year after Boston Dynamics was sold to SoftBank, the company that also acquired Aldebaran Robotics (known for the Pepper and Nao robots). During the 2018 IEEE/Robotics Society of Japan International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, we heard that Rethink Robotics, which created the collaborative robot industry and had a large impact on our view of robots in industrial applications, had closed its doors. Some months before, Jibo and Mayfield Robotics, makers of Kuri, were forced to shut down sales and operations.

Want to expand your knowledge of the AI world? Make sure you're following these industry leaders on Twitter. The world of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics is evolving all the time, with job opportunities and new products springing up constantly. It's never been a better time for someone interested in building a career in AI. While the jobs, companies and skills may vary, the wider industry trends are always worth keeping an eye on if you're serious about an AI career.

In the wake of the closure of Apple's autonomous car division (Project Titan) this week, one questions if Steve Jobs' axiom still holds true. "Some people say, 'Give the customers what they want.' Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do," declared Jobs and continued with an analogy, "I think Henry Ford once said, 'If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'a faster horse!'" Titan joins a growing graveyard of autonomous innovations, which is filled with the tombstones of Baxter, Jibo, Kuri and many broken quadcopters. If anything holds true, not every founder is Steve Jobs or Henry Ford and listening to public sentiment could be a bellwether for success. Adam Jonas of Morgan Stanley announced on January 9, 2019 from the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) floor, "It's official. It's the timing… the telemetry of adoption for L5 cars without safety drivers expected by many investors may be too aggressive by a decade… possibly decades."

Rethink Robotics' Sawyer (left) and Baxter collaborative robots. It was full of ups and downs, of course, but it will unfortunately be remembered more for the downs than anything. So before we turn our attention to 2019 trends to watch, let's recap the major robotics stories of 2018. Make sure to also check out our recap of the 10 most funded robotics companies of 2018. What will you remember most from this year?

For a serious research robot, Baxter is a charmer. Its face is a flat screen that telegraphs "feelings" like embarrassment (rosy cheeks, upturned eyebrows). If you're so inclined, you can sit in front of it and make it read your mind to fix its mistakes. Or you can point to objects for it to pick up. If it gets confused, it can actually ask you for clarification, a seemingly simple interaction that's in fact a big deal for the budding field of human-robot communication.

The Bad Boy of Robotics was in high spirits. Rodney Brooks had a lot to show us as we zigzagged through Rethink Robotics' office in Boston on a June morning in 2012. That was the day Brooks introduced us to Baxter, a robot he said would transform manufacturing and "sell like hotcakes." So it was with a bit of sadness that we found out last night that Rethink is shutting down. After a long 10-year run (the company was founded as Heartland Robotics, remember?) and US $150 million raised from investors, Rethink ran out of steam as sales fell short of the company's goals.