Availability of 1-Armed PR2 SE Expands Marketplace for Personal Robot Platform
MENLO PARK, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Willow Garage announced today the supply of a modified PR2 robot, the world’s most advanced personal robot platform. According to a burgeoning PR2 community Willow Garage is now offering its personal robot platform with a single arm for $285,000. The model could be often called PR2 SE. With the added 30% discount offered to people with a proven track record in contributions to the open source community, this integrated hardware and software platform becomes affordable for researchers receiving grants from such new programs because the NSF National Robotics Initiative. All PR2s now include an updated sensor suite incorporating a Microsoft Kinect device. PR2 SE may be upgraded with a second arm at a later time.
With approximately two dozen PR2 robots already deployed at commercial and educational research institutions worldwide, today’s announcement is anticipated to grow the PR2 community and advance the non-public robotics industry. Through bi-monthly PR2 community conference calls and special gatherings at major robotics conferences, the advantages of newly-enabled collaborations, reproducibility, and code sharing are accelerating R&D in personal robotics.
While more limited in capability than its dual-arm sibling, this new PR2 increases the market by allowing more scientists and engineers to explore the innovative capabilities for private robots at a far faster pace.
Bill Smart, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis is a contemporary PR2 owner. Professor Smart took delivery of his robot two weeks ago.
“From a status start (robot off, never logged right into a PR2 before), two of my graduate students were capable of learn a map, get the navigational stack working, and drive the robot autonomously to the chair’s office at the other side of the building in lower than two hours,” he reported. “i have been in robotics for roughly two decades now, and it really is the primary time I’ve seen something work this well out of the box.”
“The goal at Willow Garage is to put the groundwork for a revolution in personal robotics by providing the hardware and software platforms upon which robot scientists can develop applications,” in response to Steve Cousins, President and CEO of Willow Garage. “The introduction of PR2 SE will only help to grow an already passionate community of researchers, engineers and robotocists.”
The aggregate of PR2 and the open source Robot Operating System (ROS) suggests that researchers get pleasure from immediate time to innovation. Right out of the box, the PR2 and ROS provide a total, integrated hardware and software platform for research and development inside the personal robotics field. Some time past, researchers needed to spend an excessive amount of their time building a robot and its operating system before they might start designing and deploying applications for private robotics use in homes and offices.
PR2 was first dropped at eleven leading robotics research institutions without charge in May 2010. In September, Willow Garage announced that the PR2 was available for purchase. On December 15, 2010, four institutions on three continents were announced because the first to buy the PR2 robot. Since then, PR2 has expanded its presence into the U.K., Canada, and India in addition to some institutions purchasing a second PR2 to further accelerate their research programs.
About Willow Garage
Based in Silicon Valley, Willow Garage is a corporation devoted to designing robots, developing open source robotics software, and the advancement of the open source personal robotics community. Willow Garage has developed a hardware platform called the PR2 (Personal Robot 2), and an open source software platform called ROS (Robot Operating System). The ROS software that Willow Garage contributes is BSD-licensed, making it completely free for anyone to apply and alter and free for other companies to commercialize. a serious goal is to enable robotics innovation and confirm that the adoption of robotic technologies is a clear process with positive societal impact. Willow Garage actively engages research labs and firms as partners, collaborators, customers and advisors within the development of both their hardware platform and open source software, and likewise supports researchers who does not otherwise have the bandwidth or funding to open source their work. For additional info, please visit: http://www.willowgarage.com and follow on Twitter @willowgarage.
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