There may be no such thing as a free lunch, but who cares when you can have a free robot? Ten lucky researchers are getting a new model gratis from Silicon Valley robotics lab .
The PR2 is being given away in an attempt to establish a standard hardware platform to help roboticists build on each other鈥檚 work and independently verify claims of robotic prowess.
Most robots destined for research have custom-built hardware and software, which means the researcher spends more time tweaking and troubleshooting than designing new and smarter behaviour, says , a Willow Garage engineer developing robots to work directly with people.
Advertisement
World view
There has already been a handful of standard robotics platforms, and they have validated the approach, says Wyrobek. For example a small wheeled robot called has helped researchers across the world collaborate on two-dimensional navigation for robots, he says.
Wyrobek hopes that PR2 will do the same for 鈥渕obile manipulation鈥�. Each of the robot鈥檚 two arms can lift up to 1.8 kilograms each, and it has two cameras and a 3D laser scanner to help it picture the world around it and identify objects.
One research team from University of California, Berkeley, has already used these abilities to : easy tasks for humans but fiendishly difficult for robots.
