willow

If you're getting sick and tired of flying to another city for a few unproductive meetings, you don't have to dream of a day when telepresence robots will make that totally unnecessary.

Beam from Suitable Technologies, a spinoff of Willow Garage, is a new addition to the growing field of remote-operated robots that project your presence into a distant location. Like other telepresence bots, it's basically a Webcam on wheels, letting you roam around offices or factories to chat with colleagues.

Officially called the Beam Remote Presence System, the bot is roughly 5 feet tall, weighs 95 pounds, can roll along at walking speed (about 5 feet per second), and has a 17-inch screen. It's got two HD cameras, six microphones, speakers, Wi-Fi, and LED lamps. … Read more

In this week's Always On (Episode 7), host Molly Wood visits robotics research lab Willow Garage in Menlo Park, Calif., to see how its crafty $400,000 PR2 robot fares as a sushi waiter.

PR2 looks like a juiced-up version of Rosie the robotic maid from "The Jetsons." But even with its buff arms, this humanoid robot can set a table with surprising grace. It shows poise on camera too -- impressive considering that the footage below represents robot sushi waiter's first video appearance.

For those unfamiliar with the open-source robot, the PR2's array of … Read more

It would appear the robotics industry is having its Linux moment, which backers hope will unleash a torrent of creativity around robots. But not everyone's convinced that's a good thing.

Robotics company Willow Garage yesterday created an open-source body to shepherd the development of its ROS (Robot Operating System). Called the Open Source Robotics Foundation, the goal is get more people writing software for robots, particularly for commercial and consumer use, say its creators.

Everyone agrees robots need killer apps to graduate beyond curiosities and cool demos, much the way the spreadsheet helped catalyze the PC movement. And … Read more

Everything cool in technology eventually becomes mundane. I think history shall record that robots, once the stuff of science fiction and fantasy, crossed this threshold when they began picking poop off the floor.

Willow Garage's PR2, a humanoid with an evolving MacGyver skillset, has added shit disturber to its many talents.

Ben Cohen and friends at the University of Pennsylvania's GRASP lab recently took the wraps off this awesome new technology, named POOP SCOOP (Perception of Offensive Products and Sensorized Control of Object Pickup). Hello, Ig Nobel prize. … Read more

Realizing too late the threat of its PR2 robots taking over the world, Willow Garage today began offering a less dangerous version with only one arm.

The PR2 SE can be yours for the low, low price of only $285,000. That's way down from $400,000 for a two-armed PR2, and a discount is even available to those who make significant contributions to the open-source Robot Operating System (ROS) community. Users can buy another arm later if they want.

PR2 has made the rounds of late with its skills in helping people, reading, cooking, tag-teaming with a TurtleBot to serve drinks, and fetching beer.

Willow Garage says about two dozen PR2s, which went on sale last September, are being used by researchers around the world, and that PR2 SE will expand the community because it's more affordable. … Read more

PR2, the beer-fetching, laundry-folding, breakfast-making jack of all trades robot, has taken up a job as personal assistant for a man disabled by a stroke.

Maker Willow Garage has partnered with Georgia Tech's Charlie Kemp and colleagues of the Healthcare Robotics Lab to help Henry Evans and his wife Jane in a project dubbed Robots for Humanity.

It sounds rather grandiose, but the humanoid robot has made a real difference in the life of Evans, who suffered a brain stem stroke at age 40 that left him paralyzed and mute. Therapy has enabled him to move his head and a finger.

That allows him to use a computer and control PR2. The bot helped him scratch an itch for the first time in 10 years.

As the vid below shows, Evans prefers to shave himself with PR2 rather than have others do it. … Read more

Should celebrity chefs be worried? Willow Garage's PR2 robot is cooking up a storm, what with chocolate chip cookies at MIT and now Bavarian breakfasts in Germany.

Researchers at Technical University Munich recently paired PR2 with Rosie, a two-armed robot that has a Kinect 3D sensor like PR2. The robo-couple enacted a charming household scene of shopping for ingredients and cooking together.

In the vid below, the robots are seen preparing a Bavarian breakfast of Weisswurst sausages. PR2 retrieves objects from a shelf in a shopping simulation, then uses a bread slicer to cut up a baguette. It doesn't seem like PR2 uses the shopping goods when cooking, however.

Meanwhile, Rosie puts the Weisswurst in a pot, boils them, and places them on a plate for PR2 to serve with the bread. The demo, prepared by Munich-based CoTeSys (Cognition for Technical Systems), gets a round of applause by onlookers.

They fared much better than this pancake-making robot, which still makes me laugh. … Read more

Since researchers around the world are experimenting with Willow Garage's PR2 robot, it keeps acquiring cool new skills like bagging groceries, doing housework, and handling beer bottles.

Recently, engineers at the University of Pennsylvania gave PR2 some literacy skills. As seen in the video below, it can roam the halls of campus reading out posters on doors and walls.

Menglong Zhu and colleagues at the university's GRASP robotics lab tinkered with a Kinect-equipped PR2 dubbed "Graspy" and taught it to recognize printed text on paper and signs as well as handwriting on whiteboard.

First, it locates text on a nearby surface (including the floor and labels on household products). Then it performs text recognition using Tesseract OCR software, and reads the words aloud.

Graspy can handle various fonts and text colors, but its reading isn't smooth or perfect, missing the digits "50" on one poster--perhaps because they were stylized.

The skill isn't earth-shattering, and indeed humanoid robots have been reading text and even musical scores for years. Still, it's cute to see Graspy exploring its new ability to read just like a child does. … Read more

Willow Garage's $400,000 open-source PR2 personal robot is a jack of all trades, dabbling in household chores, bartending, and even playing pool.

Now, according to the IEEE Spectrum Automaton blog, a group of researchers from Stanford's AI Lab is looking at putting it to work as a cashier in the retail store of the future.

The primary goal of the research is finding a way for a robot to sort, grasp, and identify objects with minimal programming. To make this work, a 3D sensor on PR2 takes a picture, and from that single frame, the robot is able to use the raw depth data to pick up an item.

The team coined the phrase "autonomous checkout clerk," which is exactly what follows, as the robot locates the bar code by spinning the object in its hands, reading the numeric code, and then putting the item in a bag. No training or model programming is required, and the research revealed a grasping success rate of 91.6 percent when picking up 100 various items.

Just don't let it handle the eggs. As you can see in the video below, the integrity of the item is in question once it leaves the robot's mechanical hand. … Read more