Willow Garage Blog
May 14, 2012
The PR2 community recently got together for a workshop hosted by the University of Freiburg, Germany. The workshop was loosely structured around a hackathon to implement pieces of this year's ICRA mobile manipulation challenge - Yesterday's Sushi - using the PR2. But the real goal was to meet and work with new people, exchange code and tips and tricks, and generally have a great time! Teams were formed by mixing people from different schools and different fields, making for an exciting and social week. Thanks to the Universities of Freiburg, Leuven and Munich, the six teams had three PR2s to hack on.
At the end of the week, all of the teams demonstrated novel robot behaviors. Some teams decided to concentrate on picking up dishes from an automatic turntable, others stacked and unstacked dishes, one group performed two-handed manipulation of a tray, and another planned the best order in which to set a table. Along the way a lot of caffeine and schnitzel were consumed, a walk and meal in the beautiful Black Forest were enjoyed, and the robots got to play with real sushi.
A big THANK YOU to Juergen Hess, Wolfram Burgard and all of our hosts at the University of Freiburg for organizing the event!
You can download some of the software here.
Enjoy some of the highlights of the week in the video above and photos here.
Want to see more? Watch the Mobile Manipulation Challenge at ICRA on Wednesday May 16th starting at 9am!
May 12, 2012
We're looking foward to seeing you in St. Paul, Minnesota at ICRA 2012 from May 14-18, 2012! If you're interested in what Willow Garage has been up to lately, come check out our booth in the exhibition area, our talks at the conference and the ICRA Sushi Challenge.
Workshops, Tutorials and Challenges
Tuesday, May 15 and Wednesday, May 16:
- “The ICRA Mobile Manipulation Challenge - Yesterday's Sushi” - Saint Paul River Centre, Roy Wilkins Auditorium
Friday, May 18:
- 09:00 Workshop “Semantic Perception and Mapping for Knowledge-enabled Service Robotics"
- 09:00 Tutorial "Robot Operating System (ROS): Core and Advanced Topics"
Research Papers
Tuesday, May 15:
- 09:00 "Navigation in Three-Dimensional Cluttered Environments for Mobile Manipulation" (TuA210.4)
- 11:30 "Real-Time Compression of Point Cloud Streams" (TuB08.5)
Thursday, May 17:
- 08:45 "FCL: A General Purpose Library for Collision and Proximity Queries" (ThA06.2)
- 09:00 "Search-Based Planning for Dual-Arm Manipulation with Upright Orientation Constraints" (ThA04.3)
- 10:45 "Exploiting Segmentation for Robust 3D Object Matching" (ThB08.2)
- 17:00 "3DNet: Large-Scale Object Class Recognition from CAD Models" (ThD210.2)
May 7, 2012
Willow Garage has teamed up with The Tech Museum in San Jose, California for a very special exhibit.
Our PR2 robot will be spending the coming weekends at The Tech Museum, giving the public access to the PR2 and letting kids interactively program the robot. Kids ranging in age from 3 to 103 will be able to see and manipulate the PR2 in simulator and then run programs on the PR2.
Willow Garage has six computer stations available for programming, and will be demoing and answering questions about the robot. This is a great opportunity for friends, family and the surrounding community to spend time with one of the most advanced robots in the world. We have fun activities for everyone to engage in to get energized about robotics and technology.
PR2 will be spending its Saturdays and Sundays at The Tech through June 10. The robot will be hanging out from 12:00 noon until 5:00 pm.
PR2 already has one weekend at The Tech Museum under its belt, where kids programmed the robot to dance the Macarena and Another One Bites the Dust!
Read more at http://www.thetech.
PR2 already has one weekend at The Tech Museum under its belt, where kids programmed the robot to dance the Macarena and Another One Bites the Dust!
Read more at http://www.thetech.
May 2, 2012
Last year, the production team from Lion Television descended on the Willow Garage office for a day of intensive filming. Lion Television is a top-notch independent production company and they were hard at work on America Revealed. America Revealed Website
Host Yul Kwon the production team got the know our company and the PR2 pretty well.
Photo Credit: PBS
America Revealed is a four-part PBS series that has been looking at the systems and networks that keep America running. With the first three episodes already aired, Willow Garage plays a role in the final episode, "Made in the USA." This episode examines the fact that the United States is actually the number one manufacturing nation on Earth, and what manufacturing looks like in the U.S. in the future.
The show airs in the Bay Area on KQED this Wednesday, May 2 at 10:00 pm. To check the local listing in your area, please click here America Revealed Schedule
Part of the day involved our PR2 robot taking one of the company dogs for a walk.
Photo Credit: Willow Garage
We're very curious to see whether this will survive the editing process.
Update:
The segment did air. You can watch it here on the PBS website.
April 16, 2012
The history of open source is replete with significant moments in time, and today Willow Garage would like to humbly submit our own milestone -- the announcement of the Open Source Robotics Foundation. As Willow Garage has worked to grow and shepherd ROS within the robotics world our hope was that ROS would one day stand on its own. With the announcement today of the OSR Foundation, that day is finally here.
The mission of the OSR Foundation is "to support the development, distribution, and adoption of open source software for use in robotics research, education, and product development." You will find this mission on the new OSR Foundation Web site, but not much else. In the coming weeks, we will be expanding on our goals, our short- and long-term plans, and the individuals and organizations that will be leading the OSR Foundation. For now, contact OSRF for more information or to get involved.
The first initiative of the OSRF will be participation in the DARPA Robotics Challenge, announced recently. The DARPA Robotics Challenge, or DRC, will launch in October 2012 and offers a $2 million prize "to whomever can help push the state-of-the-art in robotics beyond today’s capabilities in support of the DoD’s disaster recovery mission." The full announcement of the initiative specifically mentions the Fukushima nuclear accident as a recent example of a potential robotic application although other recent disasters such Hurricane Katrina and the oil spill at Deepwater Horizon also quickly come to mind.
DARPA today sponsored a Proposer's Day Workshop where more information about the Robotics Challenge is available via Webcast. During the Webcast, Nate Koenig from Willow Garage gave a brief talk on the current and future state of the open source Gazebo robot simulator, which will be extended by the OSR Foundation to support the DARPA Robot Challenge.
The DARPA Robotics Challenge supports the National Robotics Initiative announced by the Obama Administration in June 2011.
April 16, 2012
The folks from Oddwerx came to Willow Garage for a visit recently. For those who aren't already familiar with Oddwerx, it is a very cool initiative to turn an iPhone or Android phone into an autonomous robot.
In the first video you can see how Ted Larson, Bob Allen and Brandon Blodget from Oddwerx took a PS3 Game Controller and plumbed it together to send its ROS messages to an Oddwerx Robot running its own ROS node for controlling the motors and legs. They took advantage of the existing ROS packages which support interacting with the PS3 joystick, which is in use on many robots including the PR2.
Fashion was front and center in this second video when the Oddwerx robot "grew" purple hair. In addition to responding to PS3 ROS messages, the robot was programmed to send audio/video to enable teleoperation. Since ROS employs publish/subscribe, multiple subscribers can just listen into the live video feed.
Oddwerx is now a Kickstarter project. If you share their vision to turn smartphones into mobile robotic ROS platforms, then support this effort on Kickstarter.
April 5, 2012
The National Science Foundation's (NSF) recently announced four new "Expeditions in Computing" awards and we are proud to announce Willow Garage's involvement in one of the winning awards. The NSF's Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) has awarded $10 million in funding over five years in support of Making Socially Assistive Robots, also known as Robots Helping Kids. This initiative will be developing the techniques that will enable the design, implementation, and evaluation of robots that encourage social, emotional and cognitive growth in children.
For example, clinicians and families struggle to provide individualized educational services to children with social and cognitive deficits; a group whose numbers have quadrupled in the U.S. in the last decade alone. In addition, educators struggle at many schools to provide language instruction for children raised in homes where a language other than English is spoken, the fastest-growing segment of the school-age population.
Robots Helping Kids aims to support the individual needs of children with socially assistive robots that help to guide the children toward long-term behavioral goals that are customized to the particular needs of each child and that develop and change as the child does.
Needless to say, socially assistive robots have the potential to substantially impact the effectiveness of education and healthcare for children. This initiative includes strong education and training elements, especially for K-12 students in this target population, and for undergraduates via an annual training summit.
The Lead Principal Investigator for this initiative is Brian Scassellati from Yale University who is joined by Co-PIs Maja Matarić of USC and Cynthia Breazeal from MIT. A host of other individuals are also involved from Stanford University, Tufts University, and Yale University. Leila Takayama leads Willow Garage's involvement. Dr. Takayama will partner with Stanford University's Clifford Nass in the evaluation of the initiative. Their responsibility is determining the efficacy of the methods and systems for generating insights into human social abilities via these robotic systems.
Willow Garage would like to congratulate not only our partners in the Robots Helping Kids initiative, but all of the NSF award recipients. A complete list of the recipients is listed at the NSF Web site.
April 3, 2012
The list of PR2 owners gets longer and more impressive every day. PR2 continues to push the frontiers and is now on it's way to yet another continent. The University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) is now the proud owner of a PR2. Professor Mary-Anne Williams and her team have already spent a few weeks at Willow Garage working on the robot and preparing for the trip back to New South Wales, Australia. Professor Williams directs the Magic Lab at UTS and Associate Dean (Research and Development) in the Faculty of Engineering
At Carnegie Mellon University, Search-based Planning Lab (SBPL) led by Maxim (Max) Likhachev also has his hands on a new PR2. The group has already worked with the PR2 and ROS when Max was at the GRASP lab of University of Pennsylvania. Max's group will be using the PR2 to continue their research on real-time decision-making and motion planning for robots working in complex environments.
Cornell University has a new PR2 named Kodiak, which is joining the Personal Robotics Lab. Assistant Professor Ashutosh Saxena's research focuses on the ability of robots to operate autonomously in unstructured human environments. Professor Saxena will be providing PR2 with the basic skills of recognizing human activities, scene understanding, grasping and placing objects, and more. The PR2 will then be used in initiatives such as arranging a disorganized house, find and fetch items on request, putting items in a fridge, and more.
Lastly, another PR2 now calls Germany its home. (There is already one in Freiburg and another at TUM.) This time under the direction of Professor Jianwei Zhang, Director of the Department of Informatics at the Institute of TAMS (Technical Aspects of Multimodal Systems) at the University of Hamburg. The goal at TAMS is to develop methods and implement integrated real-time systems for acquiring, processing and applying information from multiple channels like robotic vision, speech and sound, touch through action, and more.
Stay tuned for more information on these initiatives in the future.
April 1, 2012
Robot stuck? Is your program clogged up with imaginary obstacles? Never fear, you're in the clear because Reset It!™ is here!
The family of Reset It!™ apps for your Android phone instantly fix a variety of demo problems:
- Reset It Collision Map!™
- Reset It Cost Map!™
- Reset It Kinect!™
- Reset It Planning Scene!™
- Reset It Attached Objects!™
For a limited time, we'll throw in Reset It All!™, which includes all of the above apps plus patented ResetBoot™ technology to guarantee a 100% reset.
Get Reset It!™ now and your next flawless demo is just a tap away.
February 29, 2012
Motion planning is necessary to allow robots to move safely in real human environments while avoiding obstacles. It relies on accurate and fast collision checking to know whether poses of the robot in the world are in collision or not. Motion planners often have to deal with partial or noisy information about the environment they operate in.
During his summer internship at Willow Garage, Jia Pan worked on new motion planning approaches and a new BSD-licensed library for collision checking. Jia is currently a PhD student in Prof. Dinesh Manocha's group at UNC Chapel Hill, a world-leader in collision checking and motion planning. Jia implemented the new Flexible Collision Library (FCL), which provides the latest in collision checking capabilities including proximity information and continuous collision detection. Jia also implemented a motion planner that accounts for uncertainty and unknown space, so that planned paths are less likely to go through areas not seen by the sensors on the robot.
To find out more about Jia's work, please watch the video above and read the presentation slides. Also, read the paper here to find out more about FCL.
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