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?

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.

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.

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.