Willow Garage: The Personal Robot Will Be Open Source

singularityhub.com

45 points·kkleiner··6 comments

I took a class with one of the Willow Garage guys, Kurt Konolige, last fall, and near the end of the quarter he took us on a tour of their offices. The PR2's arm is a pretty impressive piece of hardware. Their navigation was a little buggy when I saw it, and from the milestone video it looks like it's still not quite there. Glad to see they finally hit the self-charging milestone though.

I don't think the article mentioned this (may have missed it) but WG will be building several (10?) PR2's and loaning them out for free to research labs. Their business model is basically "encourage and support open source robotics now so that we can bring forward the point at which we can all start making money off it".

Thanks, I've been looking through their website for a while now (extremely interesting) and wondered what their business model is.

I'm hoping we will see an open source hardware revolution in many different area's (consumer electronics is long overdue). It's so much easier when you don't have to hack the bios.

I'm hoping we'll see an easily-hackable high-quality hardware trend, much like the iPhone. Its a very solid product for 90% of users, but enthusiasts can mod it out with just a little effort.

Unfortunately the iPhone isn't a great example of a hackable device. With each new hardware revision, Apple has closed security holes and made it more difficult to jail break your device.

I'm hoping for a future where hacking your own device so that it does what you want it to isn't some kind of legal gray area (and isn't illegal either).

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