PR2 Now (Officially) For Sale

Writing by Evan Ackerman on Wednesday, 8 of September , 2010 at 1:53 am

We heard about this a couple weeks ago, but now it’s officially official: PR2 is for sale (go buy one right now!), with a list price of $400,000 (plus shipping). Your choice of color. Luckily, a substantial discount is available for people who’ve demonstrated leadership in the open source community… If you’ve got a track record of providing quality open source software, you can apply to Willow Garage for their Open Source Discount Award, which is worth a staggering $120,000 (!) towards the purchase of a PR2. If that’s not a ringing endorsement of ROS and open source culture, I don’t know what is.

If you’re wondering where that $400k goes, well, robots are expensive, especially robots as comprehensively capable as PR2. The PR2 has lots (and lots) of sensors, each of which can cost well into the tens of thousands of dollars. Mix in a pair of robust arms, all the computer hardware in the base, and assembly and testing by hand, and you end up with a robot that costs about as much as a reasonably sized house. The good news is that as the market grows (not just for the PR2, but for the components separately as well), Willow Garage expects the price to drop dramatically.

I hate to keep making this comparison, but it’s like the personal computer 40 years ago. Computers went from being very expensive, very specific tools (breaking codes) to very expensive, very general tools (doing math problems), at which point everybody with a math problem wanted one, creating a market and forcing computers to get cheaper. This is the point in robotics that (hopefully) has just been crossed with the PR2, which is arguably one of the first seriously capable generalist robots to be commercially available.

Remember, the general idea behind the PR2 is to remove the whole having to build a robot bit from robotics, allowing software developers to focus on, you know, developing software, instead of building robots over and over. Since this is the first really serious attempt at such a robot, the market is both wide open and somewhat undefined, so it’s going to be interesting (to say the least) to see how well PR2 does as a commercial product, as well as who ends up buying one.

Now, if you can’t afford a PR2, there are still some options… You can download a very solid PR2 simulator, right now, for free, and start developing code. Of course, no matter how well something works in simulation, you’ll still need to test out your code on an actual robot, but there are plans in the works (most notably from Bosch, one of the recipients of the original 11 PR2s) to develop a sort of remote testing lab where people without a PR2 of their own can borrow some time on a communal robot for a little bit to run their code on. And don’t forget that ROS runs on lots of stuff, so you can start playing around with it on robots besides the PR2.

And speaking of playing around with it, it’s worth mentioning that there is no provision to keep people from using a PR2 for evil. I asked. So remember, kids: black power outlets and round doorknobs will keep you safe.

For now.

[ PR2 ]

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Category: Research

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