Company Offers Free Robots for Open Source Developers
- By Priya Ganapati
- January 20, 2010 |
- 3:17 pm |
- Categories: R&D and Inventions
Robotics company Willow Garage 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.”
Despite hundreds of researchers working worldwide in the area of robotics, their development efforts tend to be proprietary. Researchers may be working on similar problems but they rarely share code or hardware.
Willow Garage was founded in 2006 with the idea of creating an open-source robotics software platform. Willow’s hardware has “open interfaces” but the company does not publish schematics and other details of it. Instead it is focusing on open source progamming to drive the device.
In addition to its hardware prototype, Willow Garage has also developed the Robot Operating System (ROS), which originated at Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. ROS is based on Linux and can work with both Windows and Mac PCs.
Cousins says Willow Garage’s giveaway is targeted at research labs, rather than the DIY hobbyist.
“Utilization is an important criteria for us,” he says. “Rather than give the robots away to someone in a garage somewhere, we would prefer to give it to a lab where a lot of students can work on it.”
To get their free robot, interested labs and researchers have to submit a letter of intent to the company by the end of the month, and follow up with a full proposal by March 1. Ultimately, they will have to make their software code available as open source.
Here’s what the researchers will get with the PR2 robot.
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. (More details of the PR2 hardware.)
PR2 comes with a 1.2 kWh battery pack that has on-board chargers and the capacity for about two hours of run-time.
Check out a video of the PR2 robot navigating through eight doors and plugging its power cord into nine different outlets.
Updated 01/25 to clarify details of the hardware platform.
See Also:
- DIY Robotics: The Rise of Open Source Hardware
- Unloved and Overpriced, Consumer Robots Battle for Survival
- Robo-Ethicists Want to Revamp Asimov’s 3 Laws
Photo: PR2 robot/Willow Garage