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PR2 Quick Start Video Contest

Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 23 of August , 2010 at 1:07 am

Yesterday, we posted an update on PR2′s for sale status, and included a video from 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. The above video (from Ping Chuan Wang, Stephen Miller, Mario Fritz, Trevor Darrell, Pieter Abbeel at UC Berkeley) took first place and a cool $5000, which is way more than any person has ever been paid for folding two socks together.

Second place went to Bosch, for their PR2 mailman, whose name appears to be “Alan:”

UPenn took third place with their one robot band:

Really, each of these videos is deserving of its own post, but I wouldn’t do that to you… You can check out the other six (there’s also PR2 StrongBot, posted yesterday) after the jump.

Towel Folding: Social Network Edition, from UC Berkeley:

The PR2 picks up a towel from an unknown configuration and proceeds to fold it. When it is unsure which corner would be best to grasp, it polls Twitter for advice. In return, once it has finished the procedure, it posts a photo of the folded towel.

To interact with the PR2 and assist it in future demos, follow now at http://twitter.com/berkeleypr2

This PR2 is named Brett, maybe?


Book Bot, from MIT:

This one seems to be named M&M.


Self Portrait, from Bosch:

We wrote a custom controller, a GCode parser and some infrastructure to allow the PR2 to draw arbitrary images. Of course, the first thing it drew was itself.


PR2 Red light green light, by JSK:


PR2 Painter, from KU Leuven

PR2 with a beard. Epic.


PR2 Head Tracking, from UPenn:


There’s one more video called PR2 Checkout, from Stanford, but it gave me a headache so I’m just going to link you to it instead.

VIA [ Willow Garage ]

Comments (3)

Category: Artificial Intelligence,Research

3 Comments

Comment by Joey1058

Made Tuesday, 24 of August , 2010 at 9:46 am

Mail delivery is an awesome practical use for just about any full sized bot. I’m sure once PR2 has gotten the task repeated enough times, it will speed up the process naturally. What I’m finding interesting is that bots are getting their own Twitter accounts. I would never have considered the possibility that robots would interact via any type of messaging system. This is also a most logical concept. I’m glad that robotics teams are thinking far enough ahead to include all forms of communications.

Comment by Evan Ackerman

Made Tuesday, 24 of August , 2010 at 9:12 pm

Don’t tell anyone, but I think you can twitter commands to the Berkeley PR2 and it will take pictures for you.

Comment by hershey motel

Made Tuesday, 22 of November , 2011 at 1:51 am

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