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Robotics company Willow Garage is giving 10 of its robots free to researchers in return for a promise that they will share their development efforts with the open-source community.

“The hardware is designed to be a software developer’s dream with a lot of compute power inside and many of the annoying problems with general robotic platforms taken care of,” says Steve Cousins, CEO of Willow Garage. “We have created a platform that is going to accelerate the development of personal robotics.”

Despite hundreds of researchers working worldwide in the area of robotics, their development efforts tend to be proprietary. Researchers may be working on similar problems but they rarely share code or hardware.

Willow Garage was founded in 2006 with the idea of creating an open-source hardware and software platform. In addition to its hardware prototype, Willow Garage has also developed the Robot Operating System (ROS), which originated at Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. ROS is based on Linux and can work with both Windows and Mac PCs.

Cousins says Willow Garage’s giveaway is targeted at research labs, rather than the DIY hobbyist.

“Utilization is an important criteria for us,” he says. “Rather than give the robots away to someone in a garage somewhere, we would prefer to give it to a lab where a lot of students can work on it.”

To get their free robot, interested labs and researchers have to submit a letter of intent to the company by the end of the month, and follow up with a full proposal by March 1. Ultimately, they will have to make their software code available as open source.

Here’s what the researchers will get with the PR2 robot.

PR2 has two eight-core Xeon system servers on-board, each with 24 GB of RAM; a 500GB internal hard drive; and a 1.5TB external removable drive.

The robot has accelerometers and pressure sensors distributed across its head, arms and base. Its head contains two stereo camera pairs coupled with an LED projector, a 5MP camera and a tilting laser range finder. The forearms each have an Ethernet-based wide-angle camera.

The robot’s two arms have almost the same range of motion as human arms, says Willow Garage, and its spine is extensible so it can reach objects on countertops. (More details of the PR2 hardware.)

PR2 comes with a 1.2 kWh battery pack that has on-board chargers and the capacity for about two hours of run-time.

Check out a video of the PR2 robot navigating through eight doors and plugging its power cord into nine different outlets.

See Also:

• DIY Robotics: The Rise of Open Source Hardware
• Unloved and Overpriced, Consumer Robots Battle for Survival
• Robo-Ethicists Want to Revamp Asimov’s 3 Laws

Photo: PR2 robot/Willow Garage

After packaging and re-marketing to us our childhood over Nintendo’s Wii Virtual Console and in a multitude of other forms, Sega is putting another platform to good use in its eternal quest to make us poor: the iPhone. Due for the App Store next month, the upcoming Sega Ultimate Genesis Collection will bring together some of Sega’s existing, disparate releases for the iPhone under one roof and add a bunch more, allowing users to buy Sega Genesis games directly from the app. The first one’s free, of course (Space Harrier II), but after that you’ll be paying a decent amount for your emulation fix: Sonic is $6, Golden Axe is $5, and Ecco the Dolphin and Shining Force go for $3. The variety will undoubtedly grow over time, but we would hope that at some point Sega will offer some sort of discounted megabundle, since you can currently get 49 notable Sega titles for around $20 in the form of Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection for the Xbox 360 and PS3. Basically: we’re not sure if this is all supposed to make us worse or better about jailbreaking.

Sega Ultimate Genesis Collection bringing official Genesis emulation to iPhone, pain to your wallet originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Putting aside the jittery camera shake, the Web browser sluggishness clearly showed up as the user tested out the multitouch feature. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://www.cnet.com/8301-19736_1-10438077-251.html” class=”origPostedBlog”Android Atlas/a/p

TruTouch Technologies has been working on various non-invasive means to detect intoxication for quite a while now (like the rather elaborate TruTouch Guardian pictured at right), but it looks like it’s set to simplify things even further with its new TruTouch 2000 device, which has apparently passed though clinical tests with flying colors. Like the Guardian, the TruTouch 2000 uses near infrared light to detect possible intoxication, but it’s apparently able to do that by simply scanning your finger instead of your entire forearm. Quite the leap, to be sure, but TruTouch says that the device is able to ‘produce accurate results in less than 15 seconds,” and that it packs a built-in biometric identification system to ensure the test results are legit. No timeline for an actual deployment of the device just yet, but it looks like TruTouch has its eye on applications far beyond the expected law enforcement uses — including even vehicle safety systems, and “Alcohol Point-Of-Sale Liability Reduction Systems.”

TruTouch 2000 promises to detect intoxication with a finger scan originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 20 Jan 2010 14:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Starting in June, Amazon will have a new program that will enable authors and publishers who use the Kindle Digital Text Platform to earn a larger share of revenue from each Kindle book they sell.