Yet another big Milestone was added to Open Source industry (and Robotics industry too!) when Willow Garage brought their amazing Open Source Robot PR2 in to the market. Willow Garage is a robotics research lab and technology incubator. Willow Garage develops hardware and open source software for personal robotics applications. It is founded by Scott Hassan in late 2006 to accelerate the development of non-military robotics and advance open source robotics software. Named as an homage to the garages that spawned the computer industry, he envisioned an innovative research lab infused with the engineering expertise of a product development company.
Willow Garage’s robot is called PR2. It is a two-armed wheeled robot of size similar to a human. Willow Garage plan to release it to the public to be used for academic and industrial robotics research. Willow Garage is maintaining ROS (Robot Operating System) and the OpenCV computer vision library. Both projects use the BSD license, an open source software license.
On May 26, 2010, Willow Garage held a graduation party in which the 11 PR2 robot’s were introduced. Some PR2s even "danced" with humans while being led by their grippers.
The PR2 has two 7-DOF arms with a payload of 1.8 Kg. Sensors include 5 megapixel camera, a tilting laser range finder, and an inertial measurement unit. The "texture projector" projects a pattern on the environment to create 3D information for capture by the cameras. The head mounted laser scanner measures distance by time-of-flight. Two computers in the base 8-core servers with 24 Gigabytes of RAM for a total of 48 GB. The battery system consists of 16 laptop batteries.
The Willow Garage and PR2 can be reached via http://www.willowgarage.com/
Check nice videos below of PR2 robot dancing
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