Video Willow Garage Makes Open Source Robots for Researchers (Video) 22
Tim: So Ryan, we are standing next to a device that is not running Android, and it is not running Chrome, what are we looking at here?
Ryan: Right. So this is the PR2 robot. Basically, this is a robot development platform that we sell. Normally, we sell these into university research labs for people doing research on the premise that if you are doing your PhD, before this guy you’d have to spend two or three years making the robot before you actually got to the application part of it. So we try to solve that problem for you. So right out of the box we give you a really feature-rich robot. And we also have our robot operating system ROS that is open source and free. It doesn’t just run on this robot it runs on the PR2 it runs on 50 to 100 other robots. So you can download, mess around with it, play with it. Yeah, so right out of the box you can kind of put up whatever application you have, whatever you can imagine basically you can program it to do.
Tim: Now Willow Garage obviously does a lot of work to make the robot. How much of it is off-the-shelf parts, how much of it are things that are made custom only for Willow Garage robots?
Ryan: Right. So most of the machine, sheet metal and mechanical parts are custom. So I think it is about 60 percent of the total robot is custom. Stuff off-the-shelf, a lot of the sensors are off-the-shelf, a lot of the computing components are off-the-shelf, the batteries are off-the-shelf, while mostly the mechanical stuff is all custom and sourced locally by machine shops _____1:30 shops.
Tim: Can you talk a little bit about the grip from the end of this arm here?
Ryan: Sure. So this is the gripper. A lot of people have different preferences in grippers. We went for a simple and more robust design. So it is just a two finger gripper. Right now we have dummy fingertips on here, but normally we will have pressure sensitive tips on here, so you can we have a demo where it will with this gripper it will crush the egg, but with the sensorized tips on, it will be able to hold the egg without crushing it. So this gripper also has an accelerometer in it, so it will do cool demos where it can do fist pumps, high fives, and the laser the Star Wars demo you saw before. It also has an LED in here for tracking with the cameras.
Tim: Now this arm, how long is it? It is about 3 feet long?
Ryan: Oh, I don’t know the actually dimensions, probably it looks like maybe 1 meter and a quarter or so, yeah, it is a 7 degree of freedom arm, so you can just pretty much it is really flexible for programing manipulating getting stuff. The gripper is actually 8 degree of freedom. So we have a lot of people who are doing tabletop manipulations so they bring the robot in front, and have the robot look at the scene, recognize the objects and then attempt to grasp them, pick them up, move them around, that kind of thing.
Tim: What kind of hardware does the robot use in order to recognize things?
Ryan: So it has a multitude of sensors, starting at the top, you’ve got a 3D this is basically a connect sensor so it gives RGB, picture plus depth data. And this guy is nice. When we designed the robot, this wasn’t actually out, and we’ve added it to the robot since. Because it offloads some of the computing power from the actual CPU. So this is a really kind of game changer. It is really cheap, really nicely featured sensor, so we use that quite a bit now. We also have two sets of stereo cameras, one with a narrow, one with a wide field of view, and with stereo we can do depth perception also.
We also have a 5 megapixel global shutter camera. With global shutter it basically takes a snap of all the pixels at the same time, so you don’t get motion blur if you are moving. And the other thing is actually not a camera, this is actually an LED with pseudo random pattern on it so that we can project onto objects. Like say you have a white sphere in front of a white wall, you may not see it with a camera, but if you project on it, you can see the distortion in the pattern.
Tim: Can you talk about the actual computing guts of it?
Ryan: So this guy pretty much in terms of computing it is really nice for software developers. So in the base there are two servers, they are both identical. Both of them have two quad cores Xeon processors, so it is a total of 16 cores for the whole robot, each box has 24 gigs of RAM, and I think 1.5 terabytes of hard drive each. There is a lot of computing power. In fact, the biggest drain on the batteries is from the computers.
Tim: How many of these are in use around the world?
Ryan: So we have about 40 of them out in the world right now.
Tim: And if I wanted to put it on my Amazon credit card, how much would it hurt?
Ryan: So the list price for this guy is $400,000. Now if you’re shooting through the open source community, _____4:55 to ROS, you may qualify for a discount, and then it drops the price down to $280,000.
Tim: That’s quite a discount.
Ryan: Yeah, we are trying to encourage people to use ROS and unify the software process, so everybody can leverage off each other and leverage from what everybody’s using.
Willow Garage? (Score:1)
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2 years for a PhD student... (Score:3, Insightful)
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Misleading summary. Probably more like 50 to 100 man-years of development in the PR2 hardware and the ROS software stacks.
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... costs a lot less than $280k. It barely costs 1/5th of that, and schools tend to treat PhD students as if they have all the time in the world. This company needs a better pitch line than telling us that it saves a grad student two years of work.
How about this for a pitch: "You're welcome to build your own damned robot if you don't want to pay our price."
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... costs a lot less than $280k. It barely costs 1/5th of that, and schools tend to treat PhD students as if they have all the time in the world. This company needs a better pitch line than telling us that it saves a grad student two years of work.
Sorry, that's just plain wrong. I don't know where you're pulling your numbers from. Perhaps a local excrement port.
On the low end--in the US--an engineering student or physical science student should be making ~21,000 USD/year. (Been there, done that, recently. This is complete and utter crap in comparison to industry) The advisor/project head is expected to cover ~45% overhead for each salary in tuition, health care, and other costs--so roughly 30,000 USD per year. At dirt cheapest, you're looking
Re:2 years for a PhD student... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the fully-loaded cost for a PhD student is $75k-$80k / year (ie the amount charged to a faculty member's grant). You have to remember, PhD students' tuition is usually incurred as part of the cost since they're working in exchange for (1) a minimally-viable living stipend and (2) fully-paid tuition.
We had two PR2's in our lab (Georgia Tech's Healthcare Robotics Lab). There were ~2 people working on each at any given time.... so the $$ makes sense. And the PR2 was a great platform!
Source: my work on the PR2 http://www.hizook.com/blog/2010/10/16/pr2-robot-autonomously-delivers-medication-using-uhf-rfid-live-cnn [hizook.com]
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What's with the image? (Score:2)
What's with the image on the left hand side? Have I clicked on Digg by accident?
We wouldn't fight over it (Score:1)
We'd get our robot minions to fight over it for us.
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Baxter is definitely cool. It's great for repetitive tasks done while fixed in place.
Not that there's not some neat stuff left to work on with it, it doesn't lend itself so well to many of the research activities possible with the PR2, best I can figure. PR2 is also mobile, a big advantage.
Depending on what students and profs might be into, I can see where both could find use; I don't see them competing for the same dollars or uses.