William T. Townsend
President & CEO
Barrett Technology

e-mail: wt@barrett.com
http://www.barrett.com

Bill Townsend founded Barrett Technology in 1988, credited as maker of the world's "most advanced robotic arm" in the special Millennium Edition of the Guinness Book of World Records. Its products, the WAM arm and BarrettHand, operate in 15 countries around the globe today; and the WAM is the only arm approved by the FDA for force-controlled (haptic) surgery, having performed 100s of successful knee-implant surgeries across the US.

Bill holds engineering PhD and MS degrees from MIT and a BS from Northeastern. He has coauthored many papers, been awarded 8 US patents, and won several professional awards including The Robotic Industries Association’s Joseph Engelberger Award in 2003 for pioneering the first haptic robot in the 1980s and best-paper-of-the-year award from UK-journal, Industrial Robot, in 2005.