To be fair, some of PR2′s Poolshark programming team look to be pretty terrible at pool, but that doesn’t make it any less impressive that in only five days, PR2 learned how to hold and shoot a pool cue, recognize ball locations, select the best shot, and then sink it. If you’re wondering what this robot can’t do, the answer seems to be nothing (besides using stairs and round door knobs).

Willow Garage has two more of these week long ‘hackathons’ planned this month, which will include teaching PR2 how to push a cart (meh) and fetching drinks from a fridge (yes please). A robot that can play pool and fetch me beer? Hellooooo new best friend.

[ Willow Garage ]

Folding towels was very cool, but UC Berkeley has much bigger plans for their PR2:

Towels were only the beginning of Berkeley’s work with non-rigid materials and laundry. Berkeley’s researchers will use the next two years to work on taking it to a whole new level: doing the full laundry cycle, from dirty clothes in a laundry basket to clean, folded clothes. This will present multiple, more difficult challenges. One of the challenges in folding towels was identifying the correct places to grab a crumpled towel and straighten it into a flat, foldable towel. With clothes, Berkeley will have to improve their techniques to handle more difficult and varied shapes. The PR2 will also have to operate with greater robustness and complete new tasks in order to finish the full laundry cycle.

In the area of perception, the Berkeley team will work on improving the PR2′s ability to find and interact with real-world objects. Some of the research areas Berkeley will work on include recognizing transparent objects, like glasses, finding people, and determining the correct way to grasp objects.

PR2 doing laundry from start to finish? Sign me up.

More info and an in-depth presentation at the link below.

[ Willow Garage ]

There are big plans in store for those ten eleven PR2s that Willow Garage is donating to worthy institutions worldwide. It’s a good thing that someone over there is writing up exactly what each one is going to do, since if they didn’t, I’d feel like I had to. The first installment on this presumably ten eleven part series is on Georgia Tech’s proposal, “Assistive Mobile Manipulation for Older Adults at Home.”

Robots like the PR2 may be able to help older adults stay in their homes longer with a high quality of life. The Georgia Tech team aims to make progress towards this long-held dream.

Rather than try to guess what seniors want, the team will work with older adults to better understand their needs and how robots can help. The team will also write code to make the PR2 perform helpful tasks at home. By working closely with seniors throughout the research process, the team hopes to better meet real needs and accelerate progress. To make everything more realistic, the robot will spend some of its time in a real, two-story house on the Georgia Tech campus, called the Aware Home. This will enable older adults to work with the robot in a convincing environment, and will give the software developers a good place to test their code.

Lots more details, plus video of Georgia Tech’s presentation, at the link below.

[ Willow Garage Blog ]

We posted about three different telepresence robots yesterday: the Anybots QB, the Willow Garage Texai, and the Vgo. Telepresence is great in concept, but as Erico Guizzo discussed a bit, it’s a strange combination of being somewhere and not being somewhere, and interactions with people are different in ways that range from subtle to drastic. Willow Garage has been using Texai in their office for quite a while; one of their employees, Dallas Goecker, ‘commutes’ daily from Indiana to California via Texai. So, they’ve been figuring out some of these social rules as they go, to the point where some things are now a part of the Texai communication software:

Here are a few built-in bits of etiquette:

Texai Rule #1: If you see me, I see you. Explanation: It’s about two-way communication. Implications: The cameras face forward because the screen faces forward. The pilots are only allowed to drive the Texai once they’ve shared their video stream.

Texai Rule #2: Texai do not record audio or video. Explanation: It’s about face-to-face communication.

More, after the jump. (Read more…)

We go to go to Willow Garage’s PR2 graduation party last week in person, but Erico Guizzo over at IEEE Automaton was even luckier: he attended in person, in a Texai telepresence robot. Erico wrote up a great post on his blog about the whole experience, and it’s definitely worth a read.

You just use the mouse to hold and drag a little red ball and the robot moves. You can also make the head camera point in different directions, or switch to an auxiliary camera that shows the robot’s wheels, to help while navigating through furniture and feet.

Learning how to drive is easy. But safety first! Willow makes new Texai users watch a video showing all the things you should not do with the robot — drive down a stairway, let children ride on it, stick a screwdriver into its body.

Sounds like an exciting video.

Incidentally, we found out that Texai will be available for purchase later this summer (followed by PR2 in the fall). They wouldn’t specify a price, but I would expect it to be somewhere between the $6000 Vgo and the $15000 QB.

Read more over on IEEE Automaton, where you’ll find out which Mythbuster couldn’t stop laughing at the Texai.

[ IEEE Automaton ]

Remember how Willow Garage decided that it would be kinda cool to give away 10 11 PR2 robots to deserving research institutions worldwide to mess around with? Last night was the official PR2 graduation, where the winning teams got to meet (and dance with) the PR2s that they’ll be taking home with them to do incredibly awesome things. We’ll be keeping you up to date on all of that, of course, but meanwhile, enjoy some pics and video straight from the party at Willow Garage, after the jump. (Read more…)

Well, I didn’t get one, but ten eleven research groups are getting their very own PR2s to mess around with as part of the PR2 Beta Program. Out of 78 submissions, Willow Garage was forced to (somehow) choose only ten eleven, and those lucky sods will get a PR2 for a couple years. The goal is to generate a whole bunch of new ROS libraries that other robots running ROS will be able to use to do everything from the laundry to the dishes. And, you know, other stuff.

There are going to be some fascinating developments coming out of this program. And since it’s all open source, if you have a robot capable of running ROS, you may actually directly benefit from what these groups come up with. Summaries of all of the accepted proposals, after the jump. (Read more…)

Perhaps inspired by Pleo’s epic Combot battle, Willow Garage decided to put one of their Texai telepresence robots in the RoboGames combat arena to see what would happen. Unlike poor Pleo, however, the Texai found itself up against a friendly little drink serving robot called Phun Bot, built by Jerry Serafin. Violence ensued:

The lesson here? It’s obvious: use ROS or else Texai will kick your bot’s ass. BAM.

[ Texai ]

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…)

An infinite number of PR2s, huh? And you’re just going to make them “available to researchers?” I can think of a couple of other things you could do with an infinite number of PR2s, and most of them end up with me being in charge of the world. BWAHAHAHA!

Um, just don’t look here, plz. Kthxbai.

[ Willow Garage ]