PR2 Now For Sale, Won’t Be Folding Your Laundry Anytime Soon

Writing by Evan Ackerman on Saturday, 21 of August , 2010 at 11:40 pm

Now that the PR2 has proven to be mildly successful (to put it, uh, mildly), Willow Garage is getting ready to make them commercially available. As of next month, according to the Willow Garage blog, “you can purchase your very own PR2.” They’re not talking about you, though, unless you can dig $400,000 (ish) out from under your couch cushions. The exact pricing is going to have a few more as yet to be determined aspects, of course, but I’m told that you’ll at least get to choose the color.

While $400k may not be exactly affordable for you personally (and if it is, have you considered sponsoring a quality robotics blog?), commercial availability in general means that well endowed (in the financial sense) research institutions who weren’t lucky enough to get one of the first ten eleven should be able to get their hands on one soon. And that means, more cool PR2 videos for us to enjoy and be amazed at. Oh, and open source research and development and stuff, yeah, that too.

Speaking of cool PR2 videos:

This PR2 is from Georgia Tech, and (if you have no idea what’s going on) the video was inspired by this:

This video (the first one) was part of an informal contest sponsored by Willow Garage founder Scott Hassan, inviting PR2 beta teams to submit cool / funny / useful PR2 videos to be judged by himself, his wife, and his kids. There were about 10 submissions, and we’ll have the rest of the contest videos for you in our next post.

[ PR2 ]

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Category: Consumer,Research

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