Over at the University of Pennsylvania, robotics researchers have taught the Willow Garage PR2 to pick up dog leavings, so you don’t have to.
But now researchers at George Washington University are taking that pet-care robotics research one step further – they’re teaching PR2 robots to walk dogs and play fetch with them.
As robotics applications shift from repetitive factory labor to everyday environments, robots must possess more perception and action capabilities that enable them to communicate with humans in a natural manner. Since the dawn of robotics, researchers have mandated that robots pose no risk of physical harm to nearby people. A small human-robot interaction (HRI) subfield called physical human-robot interaction (PHRI) centers on situations that involve direct physical contact, such as human-robot handshakes and extending human mechanical power using robot strength. More recently, socially assistive robotics, the use of robots to aid or motivate humans, has become another prominent HRI subfield. Social robots have a vast potential to affect the feelings and behaviors of humans. Although social interaction, rather than physical contact with humans, is the main focus of socially assistive robotics, PHRI may also come into play. Cognitive science studies indicate that touch, especially with the hands, is a dominant part of the mental model of a human user, and that manipulation of physical objects, as well as gestural interaction, enhances the learning and communication of humans. Accordingly, in the future, the most effective socially assistive robots will likely be those that also employ PHRI.
Preliminary experiments and observations involved Willow Garage’s PR2, a humanoid robot that was readily available and shares many traits with my vision of classroom assistant robots. This two-armed, human-scale robot is too expensive for applications in public schools, but its preexisting wrist accelerometers and fingertip pressure sensor arrays make it a viable first platform.
The Robot PR2 by ‘Willow Garage’ is an open platform. You can change the system to meet your needs at any level. PR2 is designed to be durable so that you can experiment with new ideas and applications directly on the robot.
PR2 allows you to concentrate on your specific field, while taking advantage of the work of specialists in other areas.
The PR2 hardware platform and 1000+ software libraries enable you, as a member of the community, to focus on new capabilities.
The common platform also lets you easily share your research results in a way that is reproducible.
Robot Operating System (ROS) is a flexible framework for writing robot software. It is a collection of tools, libraries, and conventions that aim to simplify the task of creating complex and robust robot behavior across a wide variety of robotic platforms.
Creating truly robust, general-purpose robot software is hard. From the robot’s perspective, problems that seem trivial to humans often vary wildly between instances of tasks and environments. Dealing with these variations is so hard that no single individual, laboratory, or institution can hope to do it on their own.
Willow Garage has a open source robotics software and the furtherance of the open source personal robotics community. It helped found, and continue to contribute heavily to, the robot operating system, ROS. The ROS software we contribute is BSD-licensed, making it completely free for anyone to use and change, and free for other companies to commercialize on. We see this open-source approach enabling robotics innovation, and helping to ensure that the adoption of robotic technologies is a transparent process with positive societal impact.
As a result, ROS was built from the ground up to encourage collaborative robotics software development. For example, one laboratory might have experts in mapping indoor environments, and could contribute a world-class system for producing maps. Another group might have experts at using maps to navigate, and yet another group might have discovered a computer vision approach that works well for recognizing small objects in clutter. ROS was designed specifically for groups like these to collaborate and build upon each other’s work, as is described throughout this site.
for details visit: http://www.ros.org/
https://www.willowgarage.com/