Want to know one of the great things about building robots? If you are given an unenviable assignment, in this case testing new power cords for PR2, the first question you can ask is whether a robot can do it instead.

So that's what we did. In order to validate the insertion life with the receptacle on the back of PR2 we needed to conduct an insertion test thousands of times with different cords from different manufacturers. And we needed to do it right away.

PR2 was up to the task. Instead of having a person manually plugging and unplugging ad infinitum, we spent twenty minutes writing code. The result was a PR2 app that our technicians can now use to run plug insertions as many times as needed.