The PR2 robot seem to be overpowered and overengineered, making it cost too much.
I think the robot could do better by being easily producible by hobbyists and by using off the shelf component.
That being said, I am not an electrical engineer.
I think the robot could do better by being easily producible by hobbyists and by using off the shelf component.
That being said, I am not an electrical engineer.
And with the new AVR bridge (http://www.ros.org/wiki/avr_bridge), you can even interface the "hobbyist" Arduino with the OS.
I have seen people using 30 node clusters where every node has roughly the processing power of this robot to track a ball with two cameras. Now, this was undergrad stuff and certainly could have been done better, but I'm sure the engineers who built this robot knew what it needed to do its job.
It's done as cheaply as anyone has done it up to now, which is important. Though it probably is still too expensive to be widely used, it sounds like a good step towards research to bring down costs to a reasonable level for consumer use.