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PR2 Robots From Willow Garage
Willow Garage, the robotics company from California had started, earlier this year, its PR2 Beta program. Under the scheme they had distributed free of cost a number of its PR2 robots to various institutions based on some eligibility criteria they had developed. Lucky PR2 recipients were asked to use the robot to pursue their research and development goals and share their progress with the open source robotics community so that the community as a whole could benefit from and build on each other’s results.
There is good news for those who wanted one of the robots very badly but were not eligible to receive one under the scheme. Willow Garage has officially announced the commercial availability of their robots. And if you’ve got a proven track record in the open source community you could be eligible for a hefty discount.
PR2 is an abbreviation for Personal Robot 2. It is of human size with a mobile base, torso, head and two arms. The arms attached to the torso have seven degrees of freedom. It is equipped with several cameras, a texture projector and a Hokuyo laser range finder. The PR2 runs on software based on the Robot Operating System.
The Emotive Robotic Avatar expresses feelings at the price of $65,000
With the holiday season just round the corner, its time to stack up your gift list with some innovative toys. If you want to add a dash of robotic puppetry, get your hands on the Emotive Robotic Avatar from Hammacher Schlemmer. What makes this one special is that it can express emotions using a remote control from as far as 30 meters away. It can express as many as five feelings using its 19 concealed motors, which include happiness, confusion, anger, sadness, and embarrassment. The set features a tablet’s screen with a stylus to feed in the desired emotion. The puppet shoes emotions with fully bright green eyes, his buoyant antenna and an upright torso to express happiness or half-filled blue-colored eyes, a slumped torso and a slumped head to show sadness. The robot is priced at $65,000 a piece.
Silicon Company Announce
The robotic technology were some prototypes they were all with the elite research institutes or top universities among them, the Georgia Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Southern California, and MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Things will change now and there is good news for Robot lovers, at least those who are rich. The Silicon Company announced on its blog that Willow Robot’s open-source PR2, which can pretty much, be programmed to do anything you want it to, and is now officially for sale. They have fixed the price at $400,000. The price might be steep but you can always hope for a drop in prices with the increase in volumes.
It is approximately 5-foot-tall, wheeled, two-armed and features two computers inside its base, each an 8-core server with 24GB of RAM, and a battery system that’s tantamount to 16 laptop batteries. Its head sports two pairs of stereo cameras. The PR2 also has a tilting laser scanner that helps it create 3D models so it can avoid bumping into walls.
Doppelganger Robots May Not Foresee Your Death!
Ever wanted to have a doppelganger, and the fear your own death? The legends have it that once you see a doppelganger of yourself, you would die in the same situation you found your doppelganger in. for example, if you saw a doppelganger of yourself who looks like he or she has been drowned, that means you are going to die by drowning.
Or perhaps you remember the humanoid doppelganger of Shirley Manson, in the James Bond soundtrack “The World is Not Enough”, in which the doppelganger kills the real Shirley Manson before blowing up the world. If these stories amazed you, and you always wanted a doppelganger for yourself, here is one by Japanese departmental store Sogo & Seibu. They will sell 2 humanoid robots which would look just like the people who purchase them. They would come with the same hairstyle, voice, facial expression, eyes, and even skin!
One-Of-a-Kind-Robots Designed by Nicholas and Angela
Robots are always fascinating and even cute to look at. It surely does take a lot of thinking and creativity to design a robot, and those who design one are known as either geniuses or nerds. Sometimes you have to accept these sobriquets for being creative. We have discovered a very interesting robot named “Nerdbot”, which catches your attention immediately with their cool designs.
What is even more interesting about these robots is the designers themselves. Nicholas and Angela, a married couple from Kansas City, Missouri both simply love robots. Their common fascination of robots made them design these beautiful and unique robots on their own.
Apparently, the couple worked very hard to find the parts of the robots. They visited many thrift and antique stores to search for the parts before design these one-of-a-kind robots. Interestingly, these robots are potty trained and so, you need not worry about the oil leaks.
World’s First Guitar-Turned-Robot
Gibson’s latest invention of “Robot Guitar” has created a buzz all over. This new electric guitar is designed on robotics technology that gives access to the instrument to tune itself within seconds. The technology developed in association with German company Tronical allows the guitar to recognize pitch and use its processor and six motors on its tuning pegs to tighten the strings accordingly. Gibson claims it to be the world’s first guitar-turned-robot.
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