Willow Garage To Give Away 10 Open Source Robots

kkleiner writes "Open source robotics received a huge momentum boost last Friday. Willow Garage, one of the driving forces behind the Robot Operating System, announced that it would be giving away ten of its new and extraordinary PR2 Beta Robots. Willow Garage has an open call for proposals, so that any research group can apply to receive one of the PR2 Betas free of charge. Applicants will have to release their research with the PR2 freely and under standard open source agreements. In this way, Willow Garage is accelerating the field of robotics, not just by making their PR2 Betas available, but by encouraging the shared development of robots and advocating an open source approach."

Comments

What kind of shape is that

[davester666]

You can't put a very realistic human face/body over that robot to make a Terminator. How exactly is one to start the apocalypse without an army of humanoid robots?

Very nice.

[aldld]

Now I just need one of these in a hamster ball.

Duh

[benjamindees]

Make it self-replicating. Program it to build and operate all of the machinery necessary to make it's component parts, and then to assemble itself.

Videos!

[a0schweitzer]

Videos of the robot doing some pretty cool stuff. If I was into robotics, I'd definately want to be playing with one of these!

Re:Free?

[Jethro]

I wouldn't use such sophisticated machines for something as trivial as a prom! I have a driveway that needs shovelling!

Re:Two Pincers and no legs?

[Walt Dismal]

I have to defend them. I've been over to Willow Garage and seen their machines. These are serious platforms capable of tooling around a building on their own, solid hardware. Not some Lego Mindstorms. While yes one can develop some robotics in a virtual space, eventually you do have to send these things out into the real world to do things. Willow Garage has put a lot of effort into these. Note that they support the OpenCV vision software and these robots can tool around analyzing things in the space around them. And they have arms and hands. I can see where they could operate on the floors in a hospital delivering things, maybe even towing a wheelchair, take parts from place to place, do things 24/7 where a person couldn't. Legs aren't needed for all robotics.

remote controlled ...

[Lazy Jones]

... videos of robots doing "cool things" while being remote controlled (i.e. not moving autonomously) are disappointing. IMHO it's far more interesting to see what researchers are doing with autonomous (virtual) robots in a simulated 3d environment, even though it isn't as visually pleasing.

Re:remote controlled ...

[sourcerror]

It was demonstrated that with proper software it can learn and generalise movements. That's a huge achievement, and we could argue that can be called quasi autonomous. (Well, for decision making we can use classical AI techinques like expert systems.)

Re:remote controlled ...

[sourcerror]

On the other hand they're also demonstrating the hardware, and in that case being remote controlled is irrelevant. Picking up chinaware without breaking it isn't such a trivial thing.

Hardware Specs

[Cycon]

The hardware specifications alone are pretty impressive:

Computation The PR2 robot has two eight-core i7 Xeon system servers on-board, each with 24 GB of RAM, a 500 GB internal hard drive, and a 1.5 TB external removable log drive. The computers and most of the sensors communicate over a 16-port gigabit Ethernet hub with a 32-gigabit backplane. The robot also has an on-board, dual-radio router that can be bridged into a WLAN, as well as a secondary, stand-alone access point for laptop or smart phone access.

Also:

The PR2 ships with sensors in the head, arms, and base. The head contains two stereo camera pairs coupled with an LED pattern projector, a 5MP camera, a tilting laser range finder, and an IMU. The forearms each contain an ethernet-based, wide-angle camera, while the grippers have three-axis accelerometers and pressure sensor arrays on the fingertips. The base has a fixed laser range finder.

That's a fair bit of grunt to throw at the OpenCV libraries, which is listed under their Supported Projects in the Software section. No surprise either, Willow Garage has taken over hosting the project from Intel.

Re:Two Pincers and no legs?

[tequesta]

What's the point of using simulated robots in a simulated environment? What's the point of having thousands of DOF to "play with"? Currently, most robots are not application platforms but toys. This is one of the very few robots that can actually help in developing working, robust autonomous robotic applications, and they're giving it away for free. That's not to be knocked.

Commercial interests

[WindBourne]

They are actually only giving this to RD groups. It seems like the smart thing is to ask for ideas on how to commercialize and then push that. For example, they are pushing personal assistant. Yet, the last thing that I would want, as a company, is a robot that works closely with ppl esp. unsupervised. Instead, I can think of several areas that might be far more workable. The west has stabilized their populations and in some cases are on the downward trend. Germany and Japan are 2 of these. Western EU and America have quit growth except for immigration. This can be used to decide where to focus. For example:

1. Robotic cook and dishwasher for restaurants. In particular, at resort locations. Take the example of European ski locations vs. lakes, camping areas, etc. A set of robots can work in the winter in a restaurant at a ski location. In the summer, they are re-located to a restaurant by the ocean. These give the ability to cope with varying demands better than having to hire for worst case, but then having to either cut hours, or even layoff part way into the season.
2. In Colorado, we have Horse stables claiming that they MUST hire illegals and pay them less than minimum, or they would not be in business. Their original carp was that they could not find ppl, but it turns out that they could not find them that would work for less than minimum. But a robot in there could do the work day and night. The same would be true of any other animal operation. More importantly, these are ideal for figuring out how to clean up industrial waste. If you can create robots that can adopt to the situation in a horse barn, or a pig feedlot, they can adopt to many others. These would also allow better adoption on the moon and mars. After all, you want to figure out how to walk around crap, not through.

Re:Commercial interests

[radtea]

Automated mine clearance also comes to mind.

They are focusing on economically productive activities, not deadweight loss activities like the military, but mine clearance is more important to civilian populations than the the military, so it might count.

Re:Two Pincers and no legs?

[SpinyNorman]

Hospital delivery robots already commericaly exist - capable of moving about automomously between hospital floors (calling the elevator if needed), and avoiding obstacles like people walking down the corridoor.

I would think that in a hospital environment you want something that is smart enough to do a well defined job without screwing up (e.g. running into people or getting in the way), but not TOO smart... Do you really want a robot in a hospital trundling around on it's own initiative looking for a place to plug itself in (as the Willow Garage one can do)!? These seem like very nice machines, but more suited to research rather than life or death type environments.

In general I think you don't want robots to be too independent until AI has got to the point that they can avoid doing stupid things. In the meantime, we're better off with dumb ones that can do simple tasks like delivering drugs or fetching beer, maybe even driving cars, but not so smart that their behavior is no longer predictable.