In an event that made many robot enthusiasts and tech nerds tear up, 11 robots carried flags and waved their arms as they rolled down an aisle as part of their “graduation.”
The 11 model PR2 robots are from Menlo Park, California, robotics company Willow Garage. Over the last few months, the robots have been trained for their new life in research labs worldwide where they will be used to create applications and solve problems.
The robots, each of which cost $400,000, will be working with 11 research teams whose proposals were chosen in a contest that Willow Garage organized in January.
“Robots can do great things for our economy,” Scott Hassan, founder of Willow Garage, told attendees at the event. “They can change our lives in a big way and these robots are capable of doing it in my lifetime.”
Among the tasks that the robots will be put to are folding towels and doing laundry, learning how drawers and refrigerators open, picking up items scattered on a floor, and developing 3-D perception to perform tasks such as setting a table and emptying a dishwasher.
“Robotics will have a big impact on our products in the future,” says Jan Becker, principal engineer at Bosch Research and Technology Center in Palo Alto. Bosch, which makes automotive parts and home appliances, is one of the places where a newly graduated PR2 robot will go to work. Additional sensors will be added to the PR2 robot, testing its ability to feel the environment it is in.
“Many of our products are going to have autonomy, and PR2 will help us test some of our ideas,” says Becker.
Willow Garage was founded in 2006 with the idea of creating an open-source robotics software platform. The hardware isn’t open but the company has created open source programming to drive the machine. Willow Garage’s Robot Operating System (ROS) originated at Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. ROS is based on Linux and can work with both Windows and Mac PCs.
Each PR2 robot has two stereo camera pairs in its head. The four 5-megapixel cameras also include a tilting laser range finder. Each of the robot’s forearms has an ethernet-based wide-angle camera, while the grippers at the tip have three-axis accelerometers and pressure-sensor arrays on the fingertips. At the base of the robot is another laser range finder.
The PR2 is powered by two eight-core i7 Xeon system servers on-board, 48 GB of memory and a battery system equivalent to 16 laptop batteries. Yet, that translates into just about two hours of battery life.
“The robot is dumb as a rock by human standards,” says Keenan Wyrobek, co-director of the personal robotics program at Willow Garage. “But it is very advanced and capable for the tasks it can perform.”
Researchers will get to keep their PR2 robot for two years in order to develop its capabilities. For example, for the last few months, researchers from the University of California Berkeley have been working with a PR2 robot, teaching it to pick up a towel from a pile of laundry, fold it and stack it. The idea is to demonstrate the machine’s ability to perceive and manipulate “deformable objects.”
Other robotics researchers from institutions such as the University of Southern California hope to expand the PR2’s motor skills so it can learn how to pour different kinds of liquid into a cup.
Another plan for one of the robots includes teaching it to work in a collaborative environment with people and other robots. (Let’s hope the robots don’t get into fights.)
It looks like much of the PR2’s training can be done by parents rather than researchers. Now that they’ve graduated from the factory, maybe it’s time to send these robots to daycare?
Check out more photos of the PR2 below.
PR2 says hello to the world. Eric Berger, co-director of the personal robotics program at Willow Garage introduced the robot at a media event.
One of the 11 PR2 robots moves down the aisle as part of its graduation ceremony.
Each arm of the PR2 has seven degrees of freedom, giving it almost-human like flexibility. The arms can carry up to 3.9 pounds (1.8 Kg). The flexibility with the wrists lets the PR2 wave, grip objects and rotate its arm at the elbow.
Photos: Priya Ganapati / Wired.com
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