What’s the best way to test out the robustness of your robot’s navigation system? Just set it loose to wander around the office for a week and see what happens. 70 kilometers later, this PR2 ended up with a funny hat, some stickers, and a new sense of confidence.

For 7 days, the PR2 was assigned to autonomously navigate the Willow Garage offices, locating outlets and recharging itself when necessary. If it got stuck, it was allowed to text a human for help, and that human could use a website to help the PR2 out. In 70 kilometers, this only happened twice (twice!), and I’m more than a little curious as to what those circumstances were. Apparently, this PR2 is still clocking in the kilometers, and the data it’s collecting on robust navigation will be made available to the ROS community.

In other PR2 news, Willow Garage has just sold their first four PR2 units to CNRS Laboratory of Analysis and Architecture of Systems (LAAS-CNRS) in Toulouse, France; George Washington University in Washington, DC; Samsung Electronics in Suwon, Korea; and University of Washington in Seattle, WA. This is good for them financially, of course, but the important thing is that institutions are taking PR2 and ROS (and what they stand for) seriously enough to shell out major cash to get a high quality piece of the action. It’s one thing to give away a bunch of robots and call them a success; it’s another thing when people believe in your product and what you’re doing enough to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in your concept. Congrats to Willow Garage, and may they sell enough PR2s to drive the cost down to the point where I can afford one.

[ Willow Garage ]

This is just the first taste of what a hacked-up Kinect sensor is capable of… That motion capture and teleoperation system looks pretty sweet, and as Willow Garage says, they’ve basically just started messing with the capabilities of the sensor, and things are already progressing very quickly.

Kinect is $150, and the open source drivers are free. Go crazy.

[ Willow Garage ]

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 ]

Willow Garage has noticed that people like to name their robots, and that most of the time (at least where PR2 is concerned), the name is that of some fictional robot. So, they’re wondering what the right name is for a robot, if you’re one of those people who thinks that endowing an occasionally animate object with a name is a good idea… They’ve got a survey listing their top fictional robot choices, and they’d like you to tell them what you think.

Why? Well, you definitely won’t be entered into a drawing to win your very own PR2, which is sad, but “why not” is a pretty good reason too. I won’t tell you who I voted for, but I did include an angry comment wondering why I didn’t see Tom Servo or Crow on the list, and hoping that next time they’d include GIR.

Complete the survey (it takes like 15 seconds) and include your own angry comments by clicking here.

[ Willow Garage ]

You’ve got more nerves in your fingertips than in (almost) any other part of your body. This is because you get a lot of critical information from your fingertips: every time you touch something, or pick something up, your biological sensing system sends your brain information about weight and strength and keeps you from wantonly crushing things. PR2 may not have nerves, but it does have tactile sensors on its grippers, and PhD student and Willow Garage intern Joe Romano has taught PR2 to recognize a variety of tactile cues and act on them intelligently.

This appears to build to some extent on previous PR2 research, like that brilliant bottle squeezing technique we wrote about a year ago… But there’s still a lot of potential here for fine manipulation, as well as keeping PR2 from inadvertently tossing you through a wall.

It’s pretty cool (and borderline shocking) how to see how fast PR2 is improving in all of those little ways that differentiate between a robot that’s simply functional, and a robot that’s… Comfortable. For example, remember PR2′s beer fetching demo? At the end, in order to get the beer from PR2′s hand, you had to pull up somewhat unnaturally on the bottle, moving the robot’s entire arm to let it know that you wanted it to let go. With this new programming, it would be a much more natural motion, since PR2 can tell when you’re touching the bottle and gently release its hand.

Make sure you stick around through the very end of the video to see what the whole point of this research really was.

[ Willow Garage ]

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 ]

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 ]

Oh, this is a safety video and not a how to? Oh.

PR2 is a lot like a little kid… Tons of potential, but best not to leave unsupervised. Except, I guess, that PR2 is the size of a small refrigerator and (according to the safety video) can quite easily squish you, stab you with knives, and set your house on fire. Also, it comes with a wireless kill switch, and I’m pretty sure that little kids don’t have one of those.

[ Willow Garage ] VIA [ I Heart Robotics ]

When I originally heard about PR2 being taught to push a cart, my comment was “meh,” at least in contrast to PR2 fetching beer or playing pool. However, nobody told me that the robot would be picking up trash, putting it on the aforementioned cart, and then pushing the cart over to the sink. We’re about to go full circle here, folks… PR2 fetches beer. PR2 plays pool while you drink beer. PR2 cleans up beer. Repeat.

Pushing a cart is also trickier than it seems. The physical act of pushing is not particularly challenging, but the cart makes it significantly more difficult for the robot to navigate. Not only does the cart block the PR2′s forward view, but in effect, it changes the shape of the robot, changing how PR2 has to move, especially in tight spaces. The solution to this involved just applying different motion planning software, which was easy to do, thanks to the open source environment of ROS and the standardized PR2 platform.

What I don’t entirely understand is the need for a human in the loop to identify specific containers for cleaning. I guess it might be bad for PR2 to pick up things containing liquid in case it spills, but remember that nifty squeezing experiment from last September that showed how PR2 could tell the difference between open and closed and full and empty containers? Seems like this would be the perfect time to use it.

[ Willow Garage ]

Working around big and powerful robots can be scary and dangerous. Working with big and powerful robots can be more scary and more dangerous, and getting them to intelligently cooperate with you can be frustrating, which is nearly as bad. KU Leuven will be tackling these problems with their PR2.

Suppose you want a robot to assist you in carrying an object through a crowded environment. For this to work, the robot must know which item you want to pick up, how to pick it up and with what force, how to avoid both moving and non-moving obstacles, and where to set the object down. Furthermore, it must do all of these tasks while taking your movements into account.

Katholieke Universiteit Leuven has already developed a number of tools that will enable developers to make this a reality with the PR2. Their iTaSC (instantaneous Task Specification using Constraints) and skills framework will enable developers to specify this complex task of carrying an object and avoiding obstacles, all while tracking the human co-operator’s movements.

More details and a video of KU Leuven’s project presentation are at the link below.

[ Willow Garage ]