A.I. update [Willow Garage PR2]

The Latest from Artificial Intelligence and Robotics

---

Willow Garage robot continues to advance

Posted: 17 Jun 2009 03:46 AM PDT

Earlier this month, Willow Garage's Personal Robot 2 (PR2) robot successfully passed the second project milestone navigating an office environment, opening doors, and plugging in the electrical supply to recharge its batteries. The first milestone the robot successfully passed last December (if my memory serves me well) was about navigating around an office environment but without the requirement of opening doors.

According to the company, the robot navigated autonomously for nearly one hour passing through half open doors and locating power sockets while realizing a locked door was not passable and moving on to another one. Apparently, the robot's batteries allow it 3 to 6 hours of autonomous operation. PR2 has two compliant arms with 7 DOF each.

Willow Garage was founded only in 2006 and the robot they have constructed so far has some very impressive capabilities. Sure, it is no ASIMO but the team has much less money to work with that the Honda team. Let us also not forget that the same group is developing an open source operating system for robotics, support the open source player/stage robot control architecture, and continues to update the open source computer vision library OpenCV.

The video below shows PR2 navigating the Willow Garage offices and doing its thing.



PS: I wonder what the 3rd milestone for the project is supposed to be.