Willow Garage's PR2 Finally On Sale!

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I just about lost it when I caught this bit, folks–I’ve been talking about the Willow Garage PR2 for a good long while now, as it’s been put through its paces fetching beer and playing pool and delivering mail and just about anything in between. But now, it’s finally happened, and you too can own one of these incredibly versatile robots for the low low price of…$400,000.

Oh wow. Okay. So that’s like eight times what entire houses go for in some markets these days. But cheer up! Willow Garage will actually offer a $280,000 model if you can demonstrate “past performance and leadership in open source robotics software”, which probably doesn’t apply to most of us.

Willow Garage, for its part, doesn’t expect to make a lot of cash out of this deal–their goal is to get their project self-sustaining–but this may well be the start of the next Microsoft…in consumer robotics. And frankly, the demand is likely there–who wouldn’t love a robotic minion to fetch and carry and clean? Hopefully we’ll all be able to get these one day, without having to shell out the equivalent of a new house to get one.