PR2 Wants You, Plus ROS 1.0

Writing by Evan Ackerman on Tuesday, 26 of January , 2010 at 12:42 am

Willow Garage has been putting together a whole assemblage of PR2 robots, and they want to give you one to play with. For free. All you have to do is convince them that you (and your institution) will be using the PR2 to accelerate robotics research and drive open source robotics development. It’s that simple!

If you want to get your brand new PR2 to do much of anything, a good way to go about that might be ROS, or Robot Operating System. ROS 1.0, aka Box Turtle (cute!), is the very first non-beta release of Willow Garage’s open source Robot Operating System. ROS has the potential to be huge, if it becomes what it’s trying to become, which is a way for people to share code between different robot platforms. So, instead of having to write your own code to control (say) a gripper, you can just download a ROS package that will do it for you, which will integrate with other robotics software frameworks. On the other side of things, if you write some totally awesome code to control a gripper, other people can use your totally awesome code on their robots too. Basically, the idea behind ROS is to keep people from having to reinvent the wheel over and over again for each new robot, so that people can spend their time improving the wheel and inventing the hoverpad, as it were.

If it catches on, this could be great. I’m not saying MS-DOS great, but still great.

[ PR2 ]
[ ROS Introduction ]

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Category: General

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