Bill Townsend

Bill Townsend is President & CEO of Barrett Technology, which he founded in 1988 to advance the state of human-machine interaction. He has a dozen issued patents in the US, Europe, and Japan and won the prestigious Robotic Industries Association Joseph Engelberger Award in Technology for his 1987 design of the first haptics-capable robot. This device (the “WAM® arm) was also chosen as the world’s most advanced robot in the Millennium Edition of the Guinness Book of Records. He earned his PhD and MS degrees in engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (now CSAIL) and a BS in mechanical engineering at Northeastern University.