Willow Garage's PR2 Expands Role, Fetches Beer

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Well that just tears it. Folks, you no longer need friends, thanks to the folks at Willow Garage. Not only can their PR2 robot play pool with you (like I actually told you about a couple weeks ago), but now, thanks to a series of modifications, it can also fetch beers between rounds.

It’s part of Willow Garage’s summer “hackathon” series, in which they add on new functions to old stuff. And now, the robot that played pool can fetch beer. It starts with a web-browser command structure, in which you send the instruction to the robot to go fetch beer. The robot then goes to the refrigerator (which, not surprisingly, has been modified to include sloping rails), opens the door and holds it open with its body, identifies a beer, grabs it, and brings it back to you, where it waits for you to approach and take hold of the beer before letting it go.

And that right there may be the most important application of the whole thing–the wait-and-take principle comes into play in a lot of areas, like medicine, and now that it’s been developed, it’s likely to come into play in other fields as well.