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Open Source Robot for Household Tasks

Posted by Soulskill on Fri Mar 07, 2008 12:58 AM
from the make-them-do-the-dishes-when-they-beat-you-at-chess dept.
Robotics Technology
bednarz brings us a NetworkWorld story about the development of a robot through an open source project. The objective of the project is to "take robotics from research into homes." Quoting: "One of its immediate goals is to build 10 robots and make them available to university researchers as a common platform that can be tinkered with and improved. Willow Garage will also supply 'an open-source code base integrated from the best open-source robotics software available,' President and CEO Steve Cousins said. In Cousins' video presentation, the first version of the robot could be seen vacuuming, picking up toys off the floor of a living room, taking dishes out of a dishwasher, and most importantly of all, using a bottle opener to crack open a cold, refreshing brew."
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story

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Firehose:Open source robot: Your next personal assistant by bednarz (1026650)
[+] The Open Source Humanoid Robot and Its Many Uses 93 comments
ruphus13 writes with a story about the open-source centric Willow Garage project (last mentioned on Slashdot early last year), which is making progress in creating helpful humanoid robots for household use. From the article: "PR2 is the mobile hardware design for Willow Garage robots, featuring stereo and laser sensors ... Senior citizens are a big part of the target audience that Willow Garage is aiming for. "All industrialized countries are facing aging populations that require assistance and care to remain independent into old age. By 2020 close to 20 percent of the US population will be over 65," the project leaders say. "These numbers are even higher in Western European and Asian countries." Willow Garage is aiming to produce several types of assistive robots." The PR2 robots are capable of performing critical tasks like cleaning rooms and bringing beer from a refrigerator."
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  • One step closer to the singularity (Score:4, Funny)

    by religious freak (1005821) on Friday March 07 2008, @01:02AM (#22672488)
    Ah, I can't wait...

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The singularity is bullshit. In order for an AI to have human level intelligence it's going to have to use inductive reasoning simply by virtue of the fact that there's very little that can be accomplished by deductive reasoning alone. Any entity that has the capacity to use inductive reasoning also has the capacity to make incorrect inductions.

      Human level AIs are never going to be practical for real world problems because they'll have just as many ways of going wrong as human geniuses do. People who are ca
      • The real problem with singularity is that it implicitly assumes that the intelligence of various entities forms a totally ordered set and that we will soon discover or create some superior intelligence. That kind of a claim needs evidence and we have none. And on top of that we display a significant cognitive bias while looking at intelligence. An octopus's intelligence might be better than ours at the ocean's floor. As a species, our intelligence might be lower than that of chimpanzees (they didn't cause global warming). Can we compare human intelligence to that of HIV? To that of T-Rex? What does intelligence mean? Whatever it is, we don't seem to have objective criteria for defining it. We just seem to be content with some circular definitions that use human intelligence itself as the prototype and then claim that our intelligence is superior. That and the evidence-less concept of a total order in intelligence lies at the heart of "singularity".

        Singularity is likely going to remain in the realm of "coming soon" forever.

        • What is intelligence? (Score:5, Informative)

          by CustomDesigned (250089) on Friday March 07 2008, @02:04AM (#22672720) Homepage Journal
          The root of the word literally means "to chose between" (inter[between] lego[to chose] -> intellego[to comprehend]). Intelligence is the ability to make choices, and is not directly related to powers of deduction, induction, or perception. These later simply put more choices within reach of the controlling intelligence. You don't have to be a genius to make a conscious choice. "Sentience" would be the word used in sci-fi.

          • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

            by hkmarks (1080097)
            Sci-fi unfortunately got in the habit early on of using the wrong word. "Sentience" derives from Latin "sentire" which means to feel. Sapience (sapere, to be wise or to know), on the other hand, suggests intelligence and judgement.

            So a dog is sentient but not sapient. But I guess you could say a dog is more sapient than a trout. (My dogs at least can figure certain things out ['If I go to my food dish but don't eat, the humans will figure out that I want a treat'] and make choices ['Should I chase squir
        • They didn't cause global warming, but they also live in trees and get eaten by tigers. Now maybe the living in trees bit is fun, but when they fall and break their leg, they don't have a nice shiny hospital to go to to get better. I'm pretty sure human culture is more advanced and you could say that's because of our 'intelligence' and resourcefulness. Some species may be better adapted to specific environments, but using our intelligence we can adapt ourselves to those environments, that's the difference. H

      • People who are capable of making intuitive leaps don't always make the right ones and even when they do solve problems, they may not be solving the problems you asked them to.

        The "leaps" are recognition of previously unrecognized patterns. They might be detectable mathematically. More often than not, this is a result of making conclusions from incomplete data. Recognizing that fact (ie skepticism) is the process of identifying unknown parameters. This is automatable. If the "problem" they solved is not the one you asked to solve, then you either didn't state your objective concretely enough or your didn't narrow the parameters of a desired solution enough. People who "get

      • Any entity that has the capacity to use inductive reasoning also has the capacity to make incorrect inductions.
        Are you implying that every one of those entities capable of making incorrect inductions, will?

        I'd like to see proof of that.

        Can't there be an entity using induction to choose an optimal path to check for validity deductively?

  • Anyone (Score:5, Funny)

    by artichokesquid (1252062) on Friday March 07 2008, @01:02AM (#22672490)
    ... tested out the suction on one of these yet?

  • No one would need one of these (Score:5, Funny)

    by CrazyJim1 (809850) on Friday March 07 2008, @01:06AM (#22672510) Journal
    I see a world market for maybe five robots.
    • People who can't get a woman to marry? That's gonna be half of slashdot, at least, so considering we are up to 7-digit UIDs now, it will be more than five.

      Also, FTFS: "vacuuming, picking up toys off the floor of a living room, taking dishes out of a dishwasher, and most importantly of all, using a bottle opener to crack open a cold, refreshing brew." I would think the most important of all would be the price of the thing... and/or the ability to understand spoken double killer select delete select.
  • They are cheaper than any robot, don't need constant supervision and are actually available right now.

    • they are cheaper now but just wait a few years, robots don't need food or housing or entertainment or well most everything humans do. they are also more efficient at doing work and there is no real limit to what the robot can do, it doesn't need years of training, just a software upgrade.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by QuantumG (50515) *

        it doesn't need years of training
        No, just decades upon decades of research and development.

        Which costs money.

        Which has to be recovered from customers.

        just a software upgrade.
        Whereas if I want my housekeeper to do something different this week I just tell her, and with minimal explanation, she does it.

    • Ah, but will it bitch that you haven't pre-cleaned in anticipation of its arrival? Seriously.

      And then there's this [youtube.com] to consider.

      Good housekeepers can cost well into five figures per year if you're not ripping them off. The robot doesn't sound so bad.

      • If he have a housekeeper who complains about anything, fire them and get a new one.

        Same with if you expect they might be stealing.

  • Open Source Robot (Score:5, Funny)

    by ChengWah (955139) on Friday March 07 2008, @01:18AM (#22672568)
    I for one welcome our beer-cracking overlords
  • So, how do they expect to make money out of it: do they have a patent on a key part of the "platform" or something?
  • Article: "and most importantly of all, using a bottle opener to crack open a cold, refreshing brew."

    Human: "I didn't know robots neede to drink"

    Robot: "I don't need to drink. I can quit anytime I want to."

  • All in a day's work (Score:3, Informative)

    by Tablizer (95088) on Friday March 07 2008, @04:28AM (#22673164) Homepage Journal
    It took out the garbage, washed the dog, mowed the lawn, loaded the dishwasher, ironed my pants, and erased Vista from my harddrive.
    • It'll probably be run ON Vista, in which case it will try to anticipate what you want and then mow the dog, load your pants, iron the lawn, take out the dishwasher and wash the garbage.

  • using a bottle opener to crack open a cold, refreshing brew

    Just reminds me ...

    "Our hero is Gallegher, an inventor who can only invent when dead drunk. Upon sobering up in this story, he finds himself in possession of a perfectly useless and perfectly vain robot. He has all sorts of contractual obligations that he has to fulfill, but he can't do a darn thing sober, and can't get the robot to help him unless he can figure out what its actual purpose is. (It turns out it's the world's most complex and o
      • OS? You assume that they'll have an OS? Why? Your nervous system (despite being somewhat modular)seems to be pretty monolithic.

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