Program Your Own Robot with PR2
Posted in: robot, robotics, Robots Robotics, Today's Chili
Robots need to be useful, whether it’s vacuuming the rug, picking up things, or bringing you a soda. Willow Garage’s PR2 leaves it up to you to decide what it will do.
With the PR2, the hardware is taken care of. It’s up to you, the robot-maker, to take advantage of over 1000 software libraries available to decide what it will do.
It has a lot of potential, with powerful “brains” and a full sensor suite. The brains are a pair of onboard Xeon servers with eight cores, 24GB of RAM, and a 2TB hard disk drive. Power comes from a 1.3kWh battery and onboard chargers.
Perched on top of an omnidirectional base, the PR2 ships with a 5-megapixel camera, forearm cameras, and gripper tip sensors as part of its arsenal of sensors. PR2 navigates its surroundings using the two LIDAR optical remote sensors to know where things are located. It has two arms and grippers.
It has strong network capabilities, such as a Gigabit Ethernet network with 32GB backplane switch and dual WiFi radios and a base station.
The hardware is all yours for the price of $400,000. For that price, I would need the robot to clean my house, cook me dinner, and give me a massage.
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