Notes on ReThink Robotics’ Baxter Robot

I have been trying to aquire one of these as I have always been fascinated by them.
I managed to also obtain a copy of the firmware, courtesy of Rose Gold.

Manufacturing Firmware

I have managed to obtain a copy of the manufacturing firmware (not research firmware) thanks to Rose Gold, the following are torrent downloads to the firmware:

Note that the following changes have been made to the firmware:

  • root user’s password has been changed to password
  • webui rethink and turing users have their password set to password

Information Regarding Firmware

  • The UI is based on Qt4
  • It can be booted using QEMU:
#!/bin/sh

qemu-system-x86_64 \
    -M pc \
    -enable-kvm \
    -cpu host \
    -m 4G \
    -smp 4 \
    -kernel kernel \
    -append "root=/dev/sda console=ttyS0 rootfstype=ext4 quiet splash=silent intel_iommu=off logo.nologo video=vmwgfx:1024x600" \
    -drive file=baxter_rootfs.img,format=raw \
    \
    -drive if=none,id=usbstick,format=raw,file=usb_stick.img \
    -usb \
    -device usb-ehci,id=ehci \
    \
    -netdev user,id=hostnet0,hostfwd=tcp::9292-:9292,hostfwd=tcp::9393-:9393,hostfwd=tcp::9090-:9090 \
    -netdev user,id=hostnet1 \
    -device e1000e,netdev=hostnet0,id=net0,mac=64:00:6a:50:4b:9e \
    -device e1000e,netdev=hostnet1,id=net1,mac=00:0a:f7:89:4e:3f \
    \
    -device nec-usb-xhci,id=xhci \
    -device usb-kbd \
    -device usb-storage,bus=ehci.0,drive=usbstick \
    \
    -device vmware-svga,vgamem_mb=512 \
    -serial stdio
  • The arrow keys work for navigation
  • The delete key works for backwards key
  • The enter key works as select
  • It is not known what keyboard key maps to the ReThink key on the robot
  • The firmware runs Gentoo

Misc

  • Sawyer robots will brick themselves if the BIOS battery runs out
  • Recommended repair strategy: utilise https://bios-pw.org/ to enter the BIOS and enable the TPM
  • Should function until depowered, long-term repair strategy requires dissasembling the control box, the internal Dell PC and replacing the battery
  • Documentation is available on archive.org
  • Old “Baxter University” videos have been uploaded to the CoThink Robotics channel

Hardware

  • Serial Elastic Actuators
  • Sawyer uses an off-the-shelf Dell PC inside its control box (the entire PC, not just the motherboard)
  • Baxter likely uses similar
  • 2.2kg max arm payload

Research Firmware

Baxter’s research software runs Gentoo Linux

Linux baxter 3.14.14-gentoo #1 SMP Mon Jul 6 16:49:05 EDT 2015 x86_64 Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3770 CPU @ 3.40GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

It has the following partition layout as of research software v1.2.0

NAME   MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda      8:0    0 59.6G  0 disk  
|-sda1   8:1    0  200M  0 part  
|-sda2   8:2    0    4G  0 part  
|-sda3   8:3    0    2G  0 part /var/lib/rethink/mnt/data
|-sda4   8:4    0    1G  0 part [SWAP]
|-sda5   8:5    0 26.2G  0 part  
`-sda6   8:6    0 26.2G  0 part /

It is believed that the sda5 partition contains a recovery backup of the robot’s rootfs used for factory resetting the robot.
Factory reset procedure is currently unknown for Baxter research robots.

The software is seemingly installed under a rethink-rsdk package.