Bill Townsend

Bill is Barrett's engineering-driven President & CEO. With the guidance of Barrett’s board of directors, he is realizing a people-centric vision of robotics. Bill assembled Barrett’s adept engineering team to attack the most fundamental challenges in robotics, resulting in patented innovations that will impact robotics for many years to come. Before founding Barrett, Bill created the world’s first haptic manipulator, dubbed WAM™ and designed to be user-centric, during his PhD’88 completed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He completed his PhD-minor at Harvard Business School and Sloan School of Management on Managing Technical Innovation. Beginning in the 1970s, Bill worked on a series of engineering development projects at GTE Laboratories, Bird Machine, Co., and NASA. Bill has won more than a dozen awards, including the Joseph F. Engelberger Award, for his technical leadership in robotics and has authored many papers and patents on the f