PR2 Learns To Self-Calibrate
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Tuesday, 16 of March , 2010 at 2:12 am
Under development at Willow Garage is a new ROS stack for PR2 that will allow it to completely calibrate itself. According to the Willow Garage blog, “you can start the process before lunch, and by the time you get back, there’s a nicely calibrated robot ready to go.” Robots, for all their charms, tend to rely fairly heavily on being well calibrated… If you’ve ever programmed a humanoid hobby robot, you’re probably familiar with the necessity to “zero” out the servos just about every time you use the thing lest it immediately throw itself to the ground in protest when you try to get it to walk.
It’s not just that calibration is relatively tedious and time consuming, it’s that you need to repeat it over and over again, which is a waste of time in that you’re not actively improving the functionality of the bot. What’s that you say? Something is inefficient and needs to be repeated over and over? That’s just the type of thing that screams “automate me!” to programmers, which is why a calibration stack will be included in a future ROS release. Eventually, the calibration stack will hopefully mature to the point where self calibration can be applied to just about any type of robot running ROS.
[ Willow Garage ]
Comments (2)
Category: Research
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Comment by Sherry
Made Sunday, 20 of November , 2011 at 3:41 pm
Your ideas on this issue is very captivating and I hope to see more articles on your website about it. I have bookmarked http://www.botjunkie.com/2010/03/16/pr2-learns-to-self-calibrate/ so I can not miss out on any future pieces related to this matter.
Comment by computer service san francisco
Made Tuesday, 22 of November , 2011 at 1:59 pm
Youre so cool! I dont suppose Ive read anything like this before. So nice to find somebody with some original thoughts on this subject.
