Give your housekeeper the Day Off - Company offers free Personal Robot



Like the Personal Computer, the Personal Robot could be the next reality that will change the use of robots from being large, expensive, and useless, to being small, inexpensive, and extremely useful.

.Last January 22nd Willow Garage announced “Today, we finished our third milestone! Simply put, ROS has reached 1.0 status…we also recently unveiled the PR2 Beta”.

ROS is the short for the Robot Operating System, which originated at Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. ROS is based on Linux and can work with both Windows and Mac PCs. The PR2 (Personal Robot 2) is based on an open-source hardware and software platform.

Willow Garage, a robotics company is giving 10 of its robots free to researchers in return for a promise that they will share their development efforts with the open-source community.

“The hardware is designed to be a software developer’s dream with a lot of compute power inside and many of the annoying problems with general robotic platforms taken care of,” says Steve Cousins, CEO of Willow Garage. “We have created a platform that is going to accelerate the development of personal robotics.”

PR2 has two eight-core Xeon system servers on-board, each with 24 GB of RAM; a 500GB internal hard drive; and a 1.5TB external removable drive.

The robot has accelerometers and pressure sensors distributed across its head, arms and base. Its head contains two stereo camera pairs coupled with an LED projector, a 5MP camera and a tilting laser range finder. The forearms each have an Ethernet-based wide-angle camera.

The robot’s two arms have almost the same range of motion as human arms, says Willow Garage, and its spine is extensible so it can reach objects on countertops.

PR2 comes with a 1.2 kWh battery pack that has on-board chargers and the capacity for about two hours of run-time.


Read More http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/01/willow-garage-free-robots/

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