For those of you who could not attend ICRA 2012, here is a video compilation of all the awesome robots that were present including, DARPA, ARM, NASA’s Robonaut2, Willow Garage PR2, ReconRobotics Scout and Intuitive DaVinci.
Via IEEE Spectrum.
Posts Tagged ‘Willow Garage’
Cool Robots From ICRA 2012
Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012
Outsource Your Chores Through a Robot Via the Heaphy Project
Monday, March 26th, 2012When we think about cloud robotics, we understand it consist of off-loading the computationally intensive tasks from a robot to a more powerful external resource that will process the data and send an answer or instructions on what to do back to the robot. We usually envision this computational outsourcing to be done by powerful server farms, but Tim Field from Willow Garage has a different idea and devised a system to allow these complex tasks to be offloaded to other humans.
The Heaphy Project allows humans to help ROS-enabled robots perform complex tasks via teleoperation. This means that if you need to empty your dryer, you could ask your robot to do it which, in turn, will hire a human to help him with the chore. This might seem a convoluted patch to follow in order to have humans perform chores but the long-term goal is to have robots learn these tasks from their human operators.
The video bellow explains how this projects works and how you can get started teleoperating robots via the Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Robots for Humanity, PR2 Helps Humans in Need
Tuesday, July 19th, 2011PR2 from Willow Garage is now able to help people with disabilities to perform everyday tasks such as manipulating objects shaving and more. The video below illustrates the scope and the results of the Robots for Humanity project that Willow Garage, the Healthcare Robotics Lab at Georgia Tech, and Henry and Jane Evans are pioneering.
Via Willow Garage.
ROS Turns 3, PR2 Rolls for 7 Days, Willow Garage Goes Crazy
Monday, December 20th, 2010Many new things happened at Willow Garage recently. So let’s go ahead and have a look at all the awesome news.
ROS Turns Three
The Robot Operating System celebrated its third anniversary. It has come a long way since its beginning and should go even further in the future. See the video below for a quick overview of all the cool things ROS is capable of.
PR2 Keeps Going and Going
PR2 keeps going and going...
As reposted by the Continuous Ops department from Willow Garage, the PR2 was set to roam free around their office. After 7 days it travelled 70 kilometres, and on the latest news, it is up to 100 km. This is intended to demonstrate and improve the robustness or PR2′s navigation capabilities. PR2 must recharge its battery whenever it runs out of power by plunging its charger into a regular plug (it has no fancy docking station). Also, it is allowed to text a human in case it got stuck, the human would then use a web interface to free the robot. So far the robot required a human twice.
As a result of this long and awesome trip, the PR2 gained a bunch of stickers, a funky hat and a new sense of confidence.
Four PR2 Were Sold
Willow Garage has already shipped the shiny new robots to Samsung’s resarch center in Suwon, South Korea, the University of Washington in Seattle, George Washington University in DC, and the CNRS Laboratory of Analysis and Architecture of Systems in Toulouse, France. After the primary eleven robots that were donated to universities, these are the first PR2s to sold and leave Willow Garage in order to enjoy a life of their own. If you are thinking about getting one, keep in mind that they cost 400 000$ each. The video below summarizes the PR2 beta program and the progress made by the PR2 in the last years.
Via Willow Garage Blog.
Kinect + Robots = Awesomeness
Wednesday, November 24th, 2010
Kinect Hacked
The Kinect was quickly hacked a few weeks ago and now, the development around this sensor is advancing very fast. The Kinect is a 3D camera made by Microsoft that not only senses a full colour video, but also sees the depth of objects and scenes.
In the robotics field, the Kinect has been used to create 3D maps of the environment by mounting it on an iRobot Create as depicted in the video below.
The Willow Garage people are also having fun with the Kinect and are using it to control PR2 and also to provide it with better SLAM capabilities. See the video below for more details.
Via OpenKinect.
HRP2-JSK is PR2 Best Friend
Friday, July 9th, 2010We are happy to announce that the PR2 from Willow Garage has a very good friend, the Kawada HRP2-JSK. Since robots do not have emotions (yet) or know the concept of friendship (yet), by “fiends” we mean that they can use the same open source code to perform the same tasks.
This might not seem quite astounding but it actually is. This means that the robot peripherals, physical models, and other specific parameters are properly abstracted and parametrized so the same actions can be accomplished using the same (or very similar) instructions by the two different robots.
Humanoid Robot Platform HRP2-JSK
This is the first step into having more universal robots that can run generic programs and perform generic tasks. In the same way every PC was programmed differently in the past, and now can support a wide range of applications thanks to the hardware abstraction provided by the Operating System (Such as Linux, Mac, or even Windows), robots programs will be interchangeable in the future.
We are looking forward to see how the robots can share their programs and their knowledge when they will be taking over the world and enslaving humanity!
Beer Fetching, PR2 Style
Wednesday, July 7th, 2010As a follow up of our recent Beer-Fetching post, we are happy to report that the PR2 is making a remarkable progress in this area.
The people at Willow Garage have been busy (and thirsty) programming the PR2 so it can fetch beer as dictated trough a web interface by their human masters. The project was completed in their latest hackathon.
The idea of the hackathon is to start hacking Monday morning and demo on Friday afternoon, using all of the existing ROS tools and packages. Sleep is highly optional.
For this hackathon, our goal was to make beer fetching as robust and user-friendly as possible. We also wanted the robot to safely transport the beer to any office, which requires navigation with the arms tucked. For safe beer transport we designed a bar-keeper add-on to the PR2 base — a four-holed foam block placed behind the robot’s base navigation laser. Three round holes are for stowing beers during navigation, with the fourth hole storing a convenient beer opener that the robot can pick up. Equipping our standard fridge with a tilted self-stocking rack meant that the robot could service many user requests without human intervention.
The video below illustrates how the PR2 retrieves and delivers the cold tasty beer to the humans.
Via Willow Garage.
Willow Garage Ships Out the Beta PR2 Robots
Friday, July 2nd, 2010The people at Willow Garage have reached a new milestone last Tuesday morning when they completed shipping out their eleven PR2 Robots for their Beta Program. Now the PR2 is out in the wild and we are looking forward to see what awesome tasks it will perform (besides folding towels and playing pool)
PR2 Performing Cool Tasks
Via Willow Garage Blog.
The PR2 by Willow Garage plays pool
Wednesday, June 16th, 2010
The PR2 robot by Willow Garage, which has been covered in several articles, has decided to start playing pool.
And, it works rather brilliantly as you can see in the video below.
Its small advantage compared to a human player is to be able to visualize balls and the best trajectories to follow in order to pocket the ball.
What’s more, at the end of the presentation, we see that a certain member of the Will Garage team has some difficulties…
Willow Garage Event
Thursday, May 27th, 2010Willow Garage celebrated its PR2 launch event in style.
Not one but a good dozen PR2s were there to dance to the rhythm of the music.
What’s more, the robots paraded holding the hand of their partner…human partner: -)
A great moment for Open Source robotics.
