William T. Townsend

Bill Townsend founded Barrett Technology in 1988. He is an entrepreneur^[1] and inventor credited with introducing the WAM® arm, the first haptic robot and one of the first haptic devices based on novel differential and high-speed cable drives.^{[2][3][4][5][6][7]} Recent patents cover both medical products^{[8][9][10][11]} and the Puck® brushless motor controllers^[12][13][14] with substantial funding from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH)^[15] and the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)^[16].

Bill obtained his MS^[17] and PhD^[18][19] degrees in Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1984 and 1988 respectively. He received a BS in 1982 from Northeastern University. He has been awarded nineteen US patents^[20] and many additional international equivalents and has won several professional awards including the A3--Association for Advancing Automation and Robotics: Joseph Engelberger Award pioneering the first haptic robot (WAM arm®) designed in the 1980s at the MIT AI Lab (now CSAIL) to interact physically with people.^[21][22]