Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Company Plans to Give Away Open-Source Robots
Willow Garage is giving away several self-charging, mobile robots to researchers.
By Kristina Grifantini
Willow Garage,
a California-based company that has long pushed for open-source personal
robots, announced late last week that it will give about 10 of its PR2
Beta robots to researchers who propose interesting open-source projects. The PR2 is a wheeled robot that can autonomously
navigate inside, open doors, and even plug itself in when it's low on power.
Willow Garage group hopes to push forward the field of open-source robotics generally. It could allow researchers to draw on common hardware and software programs for robots
instead of needing to start from scratch, hopefully advancing the field of
robotics.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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