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I've seen a couple Baxter videos now and it seems that the robot works very slowly. I understand that it has built in safety to slow down when it sees that there are people around, but I'd love to see it doing something useful at full speed to see how efficient it is. Surely they've tested that.

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I think part of the problem with those demos is that perhaps the robot detects humans in the room and I keep reading from their press releases that they do indeed slow down when humans are near and stop entirely when very close.

Speed isn't the main aim of this. Industrial robotics has an arms race in speed and precision but this is instead a beginning of an arms race in "common sense" abilities, robots that can do the work of humans without specialized programming. It already seems to operate at human worker speed.

Lots of basic repetitive tasks are economically viable to robotize when the robot costs $22k. This should be interesting.

It probably depends on the task, but from the videos I've seen Baxter seems an order of magnitude slower than a human worker. It looks like Baxter takes several seconds to manipulate an object, but the workers sorting fruit in this video, for example, are doing several manipulations per second.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6dKf8MZ-RM&feature=playe...

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