GOT a spare $400,000 lying around? Forget buying a house and splash out on your own robot instead.
Silicon Valley start-up Willow Garage has put its PR2 robot The robot鈥檚 two gripper-equipped arms, laser scanner and multiple cameras allow it to , and when it needs to recharge. But even Willow Garage concedes that the price tag will deter all but the richest customers. 鈥淭his isn鈥檛 pocket change,鈥� says of Willow Garage. The most likely customers will be academic and corporate research labs, he says.
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology received a PR2 during a beta-test giveaway programme earlier in the year. 鈥淢any research groups will wish they had one. Funding at the required level can be difficult to find, though.鈥�
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鈥榮 group at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, also has a PR2, and says its open software will help speed the rate of progress in robotics research. 鈥淓very new group can directly build on a large body of knowledge that has already been added to the open software repository,鈥� he says.
The PR2 has a rival in the academic market. German industrial robot manufacturer will soon be selling its own mobile manipulation robot, the .
