PR2 Fetches Beer From Fridge
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Wednesday, 7 of July , 2010 at 12:52 am
This is it… PR2 has finally reached its full potential: beer delivery. After many long hours teaching the robot to not ever bring anyone a Bud Light under any circumstances, Willow Garage has successfully completed their beer delivery hackathon. PR2 can now take orders for different kinds of beer, locate the fridge, open the door, scan all the different bottles and locate the tasty ones, pick them up, and then bring them back to you using facial recognition software to tell when it’s found a thirsty person. Oh, and it even remembers to close the fridge door.
And it opens bottles.
If it would just pour the beer into my mouth, I’d never have to move again.
Of course, there are lots of ways to go about getting a beer, and not everybody is going to have the same sort of fridge setup, so some tweaking will be required to get this software working robustly in your house on the PR2 that you don’t have yet. Remember, though, that all of their code is modular and open source, so it’ll be easy for others to take on each module (fridge opening, beer IDs, etc) and adapt them for other fridges and other tastes in beer. I have it on good authority that the Willow Garage team plans to put in many long hours honing their beer delivery software, testing it rigorously to make sure that the PR2 can deliver, say, a bottle of Guinness to a person over and over (and over) without shaking the bottles or spilling a drop. Yep, that’s gonna take a lot of testing, but it’s for science, so it’s worth it.
I stopped by Willow Garage late last week to see this whole process in action, and while it may take a little while (note the time compression on the video), it’s still pretty wild that they put this together in such a short amount of time. And like, the robot brings you beer, how can you not just totally geek out about that?
Don’t forget that there are 11 other PR2s on the loose now, and if this hackathon is any indication, we’re entitled to expect some pretty great stuff in the near future.
[ Willow Garage ]
Comments (8)
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Comment by FelipeChoque
Made Wednesday, 7 of July , 2010 at 1:00 am
A giant step for robots, An even more giant step for mankind.
Comment by Del
Made Wednesday, 7 of July , 2010 at 9:03 am
Damn, I was hoping to see it use a Bic to open the bottle.
Only slightly less cool would be to mount a bottle opener on PR2′s face, so it could use its “teeth” to open the bottle.
Comment by Dave
Made Thursday, 16 of September , 2010 at 5:59 am
That’s a superb way to fetch beer from fridge
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