Willow Garage starts shipping its PR2 Beta Program bots: get ready for ROS-powered hijinks

It isn't hard to get behind a company like Willow Garage, who not only has enough funding to invest heavily in building on ROS, an open source Robotics Operating System that's gaining traction in the robotics community, but also managed to dig up enough spare change to give away $4.4 million in robots to a few lucky research institutions. There were 11 schools selected to receive the Willow Garage-developed PR2 Beta, which stuffs some very high end sensors, two articulated arms, and sixteen CPU cores on top of a rolling base -- providing a lot of leg room for advanced functionality. Of course, in the world of robots, "advanced" means stuff like opening doors and not running over your cat, but with a common code base to work from and all this fancy hardware, hopefully these schools will manage to push the industry along a bit during the next two years that the PR2 Beta Program lasts.

[UnsilentMajority Posted May 28th 2010 8:15PM]

Wow, finally a robot that is big enough to kill on command. Better check the source before you load it.

[CRA1G Posted May 28th 2010 8:29PM]

@UnsilentMajority Danger, Will Robinson...Danger!

[kapanak Posted May 28th 2010 8:16PM]

Is it based on Linux?

[s1lph Posted Jul 23rd 2010 5:28PM]

@kapanak
I'd answer that question, but that would deny you the opportunity to learn how to read.

[thefrataline Posted May 28th 2010 8:17PM]

LOL look at the pc they have on there desk...

[CRA1G Posted May 28th 2010 8:30PM]

@thefrataline Yes, they probably used it to look up the difference between "there" and "their."

[Pa1adin Posted May 29th 2010 5:59AM]

@thefrataline Dude, you're getting a...robot?

[magallanes Posted May 29th 2010 9:47AM]

@Eli Haj

I care... a lot.

:3

[n2neee Posted May 28th 2010 8:20PM]

dude in the red shirt gots a hell of a four head.

[XciteMe Posted May 28th 2010 8:25PM]

That robot has HUGE boobs.

[keanu096 Posted May 28th 2010 8:35PM]

@XciteMe

Hey PR2, nice rack!!

[f314 Posted May 29th 2010 1:12PM]

@XciteMe

Boobs with arms attached to them, though :P

[s1lph Posted Jul 23rd 2010 5:30PM]

@f314

Wouldn't those be nipples? Really, really talented nipples?

[DeviantmacG Posted May 28th 2010 8:37PM]

Is it sold by IKEA?

[A25i Posted May 28th 2010 8:51PM]

"Gimmie a hug. Aw c'mon, I was only joking around earlier when I was all like, I'm going to kill you..."

[dingus Posted May 28th 2010 9:19PM]

@A25i
That was greaaaat.

[Twitchy Posted May 28th 2010 9:35PM]

SkyNet is open source?

[Plazmic Flame Posted May 28th 2010 10:16PM]

@Twitchy

I think we need to take our focus off Google

[Daso Posted May 28th 2010 10:39PM]

Where's the machine gun arm turret thing. Is there a room with hundreds of these things shrink wrapped waiting to be woken up? maybe engadget has been right all along.

[(Unverified) Posted May 28th 2010 10:45PM]

Someone has filleted that poor bot.

[andrewcweaver Posted May 29th 2010 2:16AM]

It kinda has that "KILL ALL" look on it's robotic face/thing. Josh, maybe you should consider putting it in the WARGADGET section...

[bbasso Posted May 29th 2010 4:15AM]

ROS is nice and all, but still very underdeveloped. I use Orca2 in my research group...
http://orca-robotics.sourceforge.net/

It's also open source, with way way more support, AND, they're the same guys who make the totally badass sniper dummy segway bots, Marathon Robotics:
http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/08/segway-rmp-bots-used-for-sniper-target-practice-other-nefarious/

[Steafan Posted May 29th 2010 6:50AM]

i'll just wait for the PR2D2

[magallanes Posted May 29th 2010 9:48AM]

.do ya think i should use the clamps i use everyday to clamp things?

[oneglory Posted May 29th 2010 10:16AM]

Everyone look into the glassy camera sensor eyes of the first of our future mechanical overlords.

[f314 Posted May 29th 2010 1:06PM]

@oneglory

Yes. The robot overlord who is going to defeat us by folding towels really, REALLY slowly!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gy5g33S0Gzo