Willow Garage PR2 Graduation Party
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Thursday, 27 of May , 2010 at 4:47 am
Remember how Willow Garage decided that it would be kinda cool to give away 10 11 PR2 robots to deserving research institutions worldwide to mess around with? Last night was the official PR2 graduation, where the winning teams got to meet (and dance with) the PR2s that they’ll be taking home with them to do incredibly awesome things. We’ll be keeping you up to date on all of that, of course, but meanwhile, enjoy some pics and video straight from the party at Willow Garage, after the jump.
There were all kinds of awesome people at Willow Garage for this event, even ones who weren’t at Willow Garage… A bunch of Texai robots were roaming around providing telepresence to journalists not lucky enough to live in the Bay Area:
I got to (finally!) meet Erico Guizzo from IEEE Automaton, who came along from New York via Texai. And there were lots more Texai where that came from, snug in their drive up charging docks in a hallway:
The Texai in front, incidentally, is the very first Texai. The production version should be available at some point later this summer, followed by a production PR2, but no more specifics (or prices) are available yet.
The Texai telephone booth contains a Texai driving station, allowing you to ‘dial’ any Texai anywhere and drive it around. Texai were initially built from spare PR2 parts, of which there are many lying around in random places:
We got to watch a few PR2 demos, including picking up objects:
The red pattern is projected by the PR2 in order to help it see surfaces.
PR2′s view:
We also got a demo of the robot locating an outlet and plugging itself in, which kinda seemed sinister, although the lighting didn’t help:
One of the teams taking home a PR2 was from Georgia Tech, which meant I got to meet another famous robot blogger… Travis Deyle from Hizook. That’s him (with his team and their new best friend) standing in the back on the left:
We all had a blast at the party, but the best is yet to come… The future of robotics has been 10 years away for the last 10 or 20 years or so, but tonight, I think we got perceptibly closer.
[ Willow Garage ]
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