Opening Doors on the Way to a Personal Robot
From: New York Times - 06/09/2009 - P. D2
By: John Markoff

The ability to open doors is a significant step forward for robotics and an
important milestone toward a personal robot industry. Such a milestone has
been reached with Willow Garage's PR2, an experimental wheeled machine that
was able to open and pass through 10 doors and plug itself into 10 standard
wall sockets to recharge itself in less than 60 minutes. The PR2 has a
maximum travel speed of 1.25 miles per hour, and it perceives its
surroundings with a combination of sensors that include scanning lasers and
video cameras. Stanford University roboticist Andrew Ng says PR2 appears to
be the first robot capable of repeatedly and reliably opening doors and
plugging itself in. Willow Garage is attempting to develop a new generation
of robotic personal assistants by building a Robot Operating System (ROS), an
open source project that seeks to take advantage of contributions from
robotics experts around the world. Willow Garage CEO Steve Cousins says that
a team of University of Tokyo roboticists recently tweaked the Willow Garage
ROS to function on a machine they were developing. "The eventual goal is to
provide a set of capabilities that are so generic and so universal that they
can be used as building blocks in more complicated applications," says Willow
Garage board member and Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory director
Sebastian Thrun. 

Read the entire article at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/09/science/09robot.html?_r=1

Links:
The Advantage of Compliant Arms
http://www.willowgarage.com/pages/robots

Milestone 2 Reached! Now You Can Watch It
http://www.willowgarage.com/

New Robot Opens Doors, Plugs Self In
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-06/new-robot-opens-doors-plugs-self

Opening Doors
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-9Yt2570xI&feature=channel_page