Willow Garage Makes Open Source Robots for Researchers (Video)

We're not talking cheap here; Willow Garage PR2 robots list for $280,000 with the academic discount, $400,000 without. Still, spokesman Ryan points out that it can take a PhD candidate two or more years to build a robot chassis and create new software equivalent to Willow Garage's open source robotware. The thought, too, is that if a university buys the robot a lot of students can share it. Sounds good, doesn't it? But much though we might want a robot, it's probably a good thing Slashdot doesn't have one because we'd probably spend all day fighting over who got to use it next.

Comments

2 years for a PhD student...

[damn_registrars]

... costs a lot less than $280k. It barely costs 1/5th of that, and schools tend to treat PhD students as if they have all the time in the world. This company needs a better pitch line than telling us that it saves a grad student two years of work.

Re:2 years for a PhD student...

[dbc]

Misleading summary. Probably more like 50 to 100 man-years of development in the PR2 hardware and the ROS software stacks.

Re:2 years for a PhD student...

[John Jorsett]

... costs a lot less than $280k. It barely costs 1/5th of that, and schools tend to treat PhD students as if they have all the time in the world. This company needs a better pitch line than telling us that it saves a grad student two years of work.

How about this for a pitch: "You're welcome to build your own damned robot if you don't want to pay our price."

Re:2 years for a PhD student...

[Anonymous Coward]

... costs a lot less than $280k. It barely costs 1/5th of that, and schools tend to treat PhD students as if they have all the time in the world. This company needs a better pitch line than telling us that it saves a grad student two years of work.

Sorry, that's just plain wrong. I don't know where you're pulling your numbers from. Perhaps a local excrement port.

On the low end--in the US--an engineering student or physical science student should be making ~21,000 USD/year. (Been there, done that, recently. This is complete and utter crap in comparison to industry) The advisor/project head is expected to cover ~45% overhead for each salary in tuition, health care, and other costs--so roughly 30,000 USD per year. At dirt cheapest, you're looking at 60,000 (more than 1/5 the cost, barely)

On the high end--here in Switzerland-- a PHD will make close to 58,000 USD base (Still awful compared to local industry rates). After accounting for overhead (mandatory pensions, taxes, accident coverage...) that shoots up to about 72,500 a year. A net cost of about 145000 or about 52% of the list price to an academic.

In either case, you get a homebuilt solution that has a useful expectancy of exactly one generation of students. (The thing will be so poorly functional that no one but the builder will be able to use it) For your two years of startup costs, you get at best two years of productive use out of it but have to pay for three (dissertations take about 1 year of funded time to write, regardless). So now you're footing another 90,000 to 220,000 in costs.

On the low end, how does 105,000 (21000*5, cheap US) to 360,000 (72,000*5, expensive, CH) USD every 5 years make sense to anyone against 280,000 USD every 10 years (typical capital depreciation timeframe). Especially when the new instrument can be split amongst multiple grad students and projects?

None of this includes the additional costs for the Professor/project head, who is paid between 3x and 4x as much per year as the grad student, or support staff costs who generally total to about 0.25x grad student costs/project?

Damn_registrars needs to get an actual clue about how much research actually costs before criticizing the the company's cost/benefit performance. As far as commercial equipment goes, this is remarkably cheap/undersold...

Re:2 years for a PhD student...

[HizookRobotics]

Actually, the fully-loaded cost for a PhD student is $75k-$80k / year (ie the amount charged to a faculty member's grant). You have to remember, PhD students' tuition is usually incurred as part of the cost since they're working in exchange for (1) a minimally-viable living stipend and (2) fully-paid tuition.

We had two PR2's in our lab (Georgia Tech's Healthcare Robotics Lab). There were ~2 people working on each at any given time.... so the $$ makes sense. And the PR2 was a great platform!

Source: my work on the PR2 http://www.hizook.com/blog/2010/10/16/pr2-robot-autonomously-delivers-medication-using-uhf-rfid-live-cnn

What's with the image?

[telchine]

What's with the image on the left hand side? Have I clicked on Digg by accident?

We wouldn't fight over it

[davidwr]

We'd get our robot minions to fight over it for us.

Re:buy a baxter

[kermidge]

Baxter is definitely cool. It's great for repetitive tasks done while fixed in place.

Not that there's not some neat stuff left to work on with it, it doesn't lend itself so well to many of the research activities possible with the PR2, best I can figure. PR2 is also mobile, a big advantage.

Depending on what students and profs might be into, I can see where both could find use; I don't see them competing for the same dollars or uses.

Re:Grad Assistants to the Rescue

[Beezlebub33]

No, you could not. You might end up with a robot, but you might not; lots of engineering projects end up in complete failure. More importantly, even if they 'succeeded' you would not have a standard, stable, reproducible platform. You would have a system held together with bailing wire and duct tape, and when one or more of those graduate students left, you would have nothing because they would be the only ones that could get it to work.