PR2/ROS Launch

Yesterday, Willow Garage officially celebrated the start of their PR2 beta program, where they lend PR2 robots to eleven (11) institutions, ten of which are universities, with the eleventh going to Bosch. After the usual speechs, the PR2s made their entrance, where they were being led by the hand (i.e. physical HRI) by the Willow Garage team.

The launch was well attended, with a couple hundred guests, both from Willow Garage itself, the receiving sites and quite a few others.

I found the speeches to be fairly interesting, actually, regarding Willow's future strategy. Scott Hassan, the founder, emphasized that Willow Garage does not intend to control the technology it has created and that their open source strategy is aimed at both the research community and at providing the foundation upon which companies can build. I had already surmised the business part, because Willow uses the business-friendly BSD license throughout, and this confirmed it. It will remain to be seen whether they can deliver on their promise not to control ROS, but I guess that also depends on how much involvement others show.

After Scott, Keenan Wyrobeck and Eric Berger, the original creators of PR2's precursor at Stanford University, took stage and explained their strategy. They emphasized that they have provided both hardware and software foundations, so that robotics "can become a software problem". At the same time, they emphasized that ROS runs on a dozen other robots already -- which is good, as not everybody is going to want a robot for the not-yet-confirmed-but-often-mentioned price of USD 400,000.

Frankly, I think it was fairly obvious during the launch that ROS is already a success, but the PR2 still has to prove itself. Of course, ROS use is also still in its early stages, but there are over a dozen other institutions already using it, even without having a PR2. At the moment, the PR2 has strengths on the vision and manipulation side, but it has no microphones and is very bulky. It will remain to be seen what kind of feedback the beta sites will provide.