Willow Garage PR2 Navigates An Office
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Friday, 5 of June , 2009 at 4:07 am
In this test run, Willow Garage’s PR2 robot (which we’ve covered before) was instructed to navigate a typical office environment consisting of eight doors, and was supposed to plug its power cord into ten outlets. One of the outlets was behind a locked door, but PR2 was able to understand that the door was locked and move on. It was also able to understand when it failed to do something, and then tried again, which is a crucial skill for robots that need to adapt to new and changing environments: there’s a difference between a task which cannot be completed, and a task which can be completed but might take a few tries.
I love the idea of a robot that is able to plug itself into an electrical outlet. Pretty much every other robot that is capable of self charging depends on a base, which is something else to buy, something else that can break, something the robot has to find, and something that can only be in one place at a time. As you can see, it takes a bunch of tries for PR2 to plug itself in, but who cares? This is one of those situations where developing a robot that’s able to plug into a socket 20% of the time (but try over and over) is (I imagine) much more efficient than developing a robot that’s able to plug into a socket 100% of the time.
[ Willow Garage ]
Comments (1)
Category: Artificial Intelligence,Consumer,Research
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Comment by quantum_flux
Made Thursday, 14 of October , 2010 at 4:45 pm
Reminds me of Spy Vs. Spy on the NES console where the spies are hiding bombs in furniture and retrieving a suitcase to escape on an airplane.
