The Open Source Humanoid Robot and Its Many Uses 93
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."
Willow Garage progress (Score:5, Informative)
Willow Garage has had a few projects. They did an autonomous model boat. They started on a driverless car, but never got very far in that direction. They showed the Stanford PR1 robot at RoboDevelopment two years ago, but their own second generation version is still at the parts-prototyping stage.
Anybots [anybots.com] is probably further along. Take a look at their pictures. I've seen that machine in operation. Balance is automatic, but manipulation and movement are teleoperated.
Beware, the robot is teleoperated (Score:5, Informative)
The robot is being teleoperated in those videos.
I'm a roboticist; no robot, at the moment, is capable of performing those tasks autonomously.
Re:article WTF? (Score:1, Informative)
Actually, if they ever get the robots to the point to where you can have a custom made one that looks like the hot chick of your dreams, that will fuck/suck on demand, and never bitch and actually shut up on demand...
The human race will cease to exist.
Leela: She doesn't really love you. She can't. She's just a machine that--
Bender: [shaking his fist] Stay away from our women! You got metal fever, boy! Metal fever!
Fry: Well, so what if I love a robot? It's not hurting anybody.
Hermes: My God! He never took middle school hygiene. He never saw the propaganda film.
Farnsworth: It's just lucky I keep a copy in the VCR at all times.
[He presses a button and a film title, I Dated A Robot!, appears on the screen. In the movie a couple sit in a cafe and stare into each other's eyes. A narrator walks into the scene.]
Narrator: [in movie] Ordinary human dating. It's enjoyable and it serves an important purpose. [He turns the table over and a crying baby appears. He turns it back again.] But when a human dates an artificial mate, there is no purpose. Only enjoyment. And that leads to ... tragedy.
Re:Beware, the robot is teleoperated [video] (Score:3, Informative)
An interview link about willow garage (Score:4, Informative)
http://getrobo.typepad.com/getrobo/2008/08/interviewing-br.html [typepad.com]
in case it gets /.ed full text below.
"Interviewing Brian Gerkey at Willow Garage
I normally write about robots in Japan on this blog but today I am going to write about a robot that is being developed in the U.S. This is because I had the chance to interview Brian P. Gerkey, Research Scientist at Willow Garage, for the Japanese GetRobo Blog, and I felt it important for me to report this in English too at this time of era.
Willow Garage is a privately-funded research lab in California which is developing a hardware and software platform for Personal Robots - robots that do tasks for humans in everyday lives. The company is unique in that it has enough resources to "indefinitely" maintain a lab of 60 researchers without making any profit. The goal of the company is to make a positive and big impact in the robotics community by fully utilizing the open source development process.
The hardware platform is called PR2 and the software team at Willow Garage is developing the Robot Operating System (ROS) for PR2, a modular software system designed to facilitate code reuse throughout the robotics community. Brian is on the team developing ROS (led by Morgan Quigley at Stanford University) and is also the lead in developing all the applications that sit on top of ROS. Brian is well-known as the founder of The Player Project which he will explain about during the interview.
The following is an edited version of the interview with Brian (photographed below).
Gerkey_2 GetRobo: How did you get to join Willow Garage?
Brian: I was at SRI doing various kinds of robotics research. I had been there for 2 and a half years and was perfectly happy and wasn't particularly looking for another opportunity. But Eric Berger at Willow Garage whom I knew from Stanford contacted me and asked whether I was interested in joining. I was a bit wary at first since it is an unusual place. And I took a little bit of convincing to be sure.
GetRobo: What were you wary about?
Brian: One aspect of it is that I wanted to understand what the motivations were in particular of Scott and Steve, meaning that they're running the organization so I wanted to understand what their motivations were in what they were doing. Because I'm used to places like universities where the motivation is to do science, and to do research you have to go out and get contracts to support it. Then there are places like SRI where you do science but the goal there is to get clients. And in a fully industrial setting the goal is to get clients by selling products or services. Willow Garage doesn't fit into any of those categories, so I just wanted to understand why it was that they were doing what they were doing. And eventually they came to convince me that the idea is to take this long runway approach in developing technologies by putting significant resources into a focused topic in a way that allows you to spend years working on it to get to a point where business opportunities present themselves. So we are neither living off day-to-day contract income as like a place like SRI would nor are we trying desperately to get a marketable product out the door in order to satisfy our venture capital investors like a normal startup would operate.
GetRobo: What is your role at Willow Garage?
Brian: My role is software lead for the PR2. Morgan at Stanford is the lead on ROS which is the underlying infrastructure that we are building on, and I'm the lead here in developing all the applications that sit on the top of ROS. And that involves everything from designing the architecture of the software that we are building to the determination of the development policy since we have a lot of people writing the software. We have things like testing infrastructure and coding guidelines - not all of it are my favorite things to do, but important things for a professional softw
Re:article WTF? (Score:2, Informative)
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
so sanitizing manipulators and refusing drink would be covered by the first law as long as the robot knew that not doing it might harm a human being
Re:Beware, the robot is teleoperated (Score:2, Informative)
Two thoughts.
1) Just because a video displays something beyond the perceived state of the art doesn't mean it isn't real. I know plenty of people that couldn't fathom the BigDog videos the first time they saw them.
I've worked in the personal robotics industry as well, and I agree with you: much of that footage must be teleoperated. Some of the tasks (feeding someone, selecting a beer from the fridge) might be autonomous behaviours but the overall combination is unlikely--it would be equivalent to someone breaking the sound barrier before the advent of the jet engine.
Still, just because you work in the industry and it doesn't seem possible doesn't mean you shouldn't CYA with some pretty serious qualifiers.
2) Please, please, please stop spreading the use of the word Roboticist. People who work with electronics aren't Electronicists. People who fix cars aren't Mechanicists. The guys behind the Manhattan Project weren't Atomicists. Call yourself a robotics engineer. If that's too many syllables for you call yourself a robot designer. If you can't be bothered to say five syllables. . .try swallowing chunks of your pride until you can. Computer scientists and Software Engineers do it every day. Hell, Electrical Engineers have seven to spit out and they still manage.
"Roboticist" just sounds like a term a 2nd grader would come up with while writing a short story for a sci-fi competition.