This is maybe only peripherally (ha!) related to robotics, but it’s cool enough that I thought it was worth sharing… Besides, it’s Friday, and you deserve some nifty videos to watch. Anyway, we’ve posted before on all the cool things that roboticists have been able to do with Microsoft’s stupidly cheap and effective 3D camera system, and Willow Garage took some initiative and sponsored a contest to try and kick start even more open source Kinect innovation.

First place (and $3k) went to Garratt Gallagher’s ‘Customizable Buttons.’ Using a piece of paper and a pen, you can just draw your own touch-sensitive controls:

The second and third places went to robots we’ve covered before, namely UC Berkeley’s quadrotors and Taylor Veltrop’s teleoperation, while a real-time color 3D mapping tool from the University of Freiburg took home the most useful award.

Taking home no awards, but one of my personal favorite demos, was Kinemmings, a game of Lemmings played using your body and the Kinect sensor. Yes, it may not be advancing the field of robots or whatever, but it sure looks like fun:

Microsoft should absolutely pay those guys a bajillion dollars and hire them as game designers or something. Seriously, Kinect has way more potential than one company can possibly harness. And as for robots, great strides are obviously being made, and the future is (hopefully) limitless. If any of these projects are of use to you personally, remember that since they’re on ROS, you can just download them and put them to work yourself.

[ ROS 3D Contest ]

Happy birthday ROS! Our first post about ROS (the completely open source Robot Operating System) was sort of as a footnote to another post about Willow Garage, where I mentioned that “if [ROS] catches on, this could be great.” Well, it looks like it’s catching on, as over the last three years ROS has grown exponentially:

These data suggest that by the time ROS celebrates its 10th birthday, there will be over 150,000 ROS repositories! Wow! In the meantime, ROS is running on many, if not most, of the coolest robots in the world, plus a lot of robots that are cheap and easy enough for you to buy and mess with yourself:

Looking towards the future, Willow Garage is proposing a ROS Foundation, which would be sort of like the Mozilla Foundation that’s brought you such quality products as Firefox and Thunderbird. The idea is that ROS stops becoming a Willow Garage project, and transitions into a community owned and community run endeavor.

Meantime, ROS is going strong, and we’ll continue to bring you all the latest and most incredibly awesome robots that use ROS to do what they do.

[ ROS ] VIA [ Willow Garage ]

We keep going on about how ROS is all free and open source and platform independent and distributable and adaptable and anything can run it and so on, but this little project from ModLab at UPenn illustrates the whole idea brilliantly. They took a bunch of ckBot modules (which, incidentally, can reassemble themselves after being kicked to pieces) and made some 6 DoF arms with grippers plus a movable base, essentially duplicating all of the basic capabilities of the Willow Garage PR2. As you can see from the vid, the mini PR2 can run programs straight off of the PR2 simulation environment, and even duplicate the actions of the full-size robot, all thanks to ROS.

A bit more on ROS, after the jump. (Read more…)

Willow Garage brought a PR2 to Stanford for National Robotics Week, and it’s one of the first times the robot has been on public display. Now that the hardware is pretty much finished, they’re working on creating and improving developer tools for ROS to make programming across multiple platforms as simple as possible. Here’s why this is important (from Jorge Cham of Ph.D Comics):

So, to summarize, ROS is attempting to ensure that robotics developers don’t have to waste time rewriting software (that may already exist on other platforms) from scratch. Also, now that PR2s are available to research institutions, developers don’t have to waste tons of time and money (lots of money) designing their own robots just to test out software. To that end, Willow Garage is thinking of making some PR2s publicly accessible as test robots. You’d develop PR2 software using a simulator, and when you were confident that you had it fairly bug free, you could schedule some time to teleoperate a real PR2 to test it out.

More (and it’s tasty!) after the jump. (Read more…)

We cover a lot of robots around here, and to be fair, not every one of them makes you think “yeah, I could totally use one of those around the house!” Well, I could totally use a PR2 around my house now that it can autonomously fold stuff. Not sure how I’d get it up the stairs, but anyway…

So far, UC Berkeley’s Pieter Abbeel has only taught his PR2 to fold towels and other rectangles, but the important thing is that the PR2 is entirely unfamiliar with the things that it has to fold. Just toss a pile of towels of various sizes on the table, and PR2 will pick up each item, inspect it, and figure out how it should be folded. The folding routine even ends with an adorable little pat ‘n smooth. You have to remember, too, that even though PR2 is quite an impressive robot, the capabilities are mostly in the software:

“The reliability and robustness of our algorithm enables for the first time a robot with general purpose manipulators to reliably and fully-autonomously fold previously unseen towels, demonstrating success on all 50 out of 50 single-towel trials as well as on a pile of 5 towels.”

50/50 on towel folding? Yeah, that would definitely be an upgrade in my house.

[ UC Berkeley Robot Learning Lab ] VIA [ Willow Garage @ Twitter ]

Under development at Willow Garage is a new ROS stack for PR2 that will allow it to completely calibrate itself. According to the Willow Garage blog, “you can start the process before lunch, and by the time you get back, there’s a nicely calibrated robot ready to go.” Robots, for all their charms, tend to rely fairly heavily on being well calibrated… If you’ve ever programmed a humanoid hobby robot, you’re probably familiar with the necessity to “zero” out the servos just about every time you use the thing lest it immediately throw itself to the ground in protest when you try to get it to walk.

It’s not just that calibration is relatively tedious and time consuming, it’s that you need to repeat it over and over again, which is a waste of time in that you’re not actively improving the functionality of the bot. What’s that you say? Something is inefficient and needs to be repeated over and over? That’s just the type of thing that screams “automate me!” to programmers, which is why a calibration stack will be included in a future ROS release. Eventually, the calibration stack will hopefully mature to the point where self calibration can be applied to just about any type of robot running ROS.

[ Willow Garage ]

Back in 2008, we introduced you to Care-O-bot 3 from Fraunhofer IPA, the lovable lil robot that’s missing a limb. Well, Fraunhofer IPA recently open-sourced their software:

The Care-O-bot 3 software platform was recently ported to ROS and is fully available as open source. You can now go to the ROS.org wiki and find documentation on the many software packages that they’ve released.

This is great news! Developers will now be able to collaborate in making these robots do some truly amazing things, like accurate object recognition, which is becoming increasingly prevalent in consumer robotics as technologies develop. In Care-O-bot 3′s case, objects are first scanned in 3 dimensions via a camera in the head. Once the bot has a 3d image saved, it can compare that saved image to live images from its camera, to determine which object is which:

Congratulations to Fraunhofer IPA! It’s hard not to win in open sourcing software, wouldn’t you agree?

[ Fraunhofer IPA ] VIA [ Willow Garage ]

Willow Garage has been putting together a whole assemblage of PR2 robots, and they want to give you one to play with. For free. All you have to do is convince them that you (and your institution) will be using the PR2 to accelerate robotics research and drive open source robotics development. It’s that simple!

If you want to get your brand new PR2 to do much of anything, a good way to go about that might be ROS, or Robot Operating System. ROS 1.0, aka Box Turtle (cute!), is the very first non-beta release of Willow Garage’s open source Robot Operating System. ROS has the potential to be huge, if it becomes what it’s trying to become, which is a way for people to share code between different robot platforms. So, instead of having to write your own code to control (say) a gripper, you can just download a ROS package that will do it for you, which will integrate with other robotics software frameworks. On the other side of things, if you write some totally awesome code to control a gripper, other people can use your totally awesome code on their robots too. Basically, the idea behind ROS is to keep people from having to reinvent the wheel over and over again for each new robot, so that people can spend their time improving the wheel and inventing the hoverpad, as it were.

If it catches on, this could be great. I’m not saying MS-DOS great, but still great.

[ PR2 ]
[ ROS Introduction ]