3 ms·

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 kiba 16y ago

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.

psilokan 16y ago
Agreed, no reason for this thing to have 8 core processors and insane amounts of RAM. It's not like this thing is sentient, there's only so much data to process.
- lukeschlather 16y ago
  I've done some work on image processing and read a substantial amount of literature, and nowhere have I seen anyone seriously trying to achieve sentience. 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.
baalexander 16y ago
While the PR2 is beyond the reach of a hobbyist, the company's meta operating system ROS (http://www.ros.org http://www.ros.org) can be installed on any personal computer for free. You can run the same navigation, vision recognition, and other algorithms the PR2 uses (among other robots) on most capable computers. And with the new AVR bridge (http://www.ros.org/wiki/avr_bridge http://www.ros.org/wiki/avr_bridge), you can even interface the "hobbyist" Arduino with the OS.
jerf 16y ago
It sounds like it is a development platform, not a deployable product. Development environments for the Wii cost much more than one Wii does, not that this metaphor is perfect.

3 ms·

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 kiba 16y ago

psilokan 16y ago
Agreed, no reason for this thing to have 8 core processors and insane amounts of RAM. It's not like this thing is sentient, there's only so much data to process.
- lukeschlather 16y ago
  I've done some work on image processing and read a substantial amount of literature, and nowhere have I seen anyone seriously trying to achieve sentience. 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.
baalexander 16y ago
While the PR2 is beyond the reach of a hobbyist, the company's meta operating system ROS (http://www.ros.org http://www.ros.org) can be installed on any personal computer for free. You can run the same navigation, vision recognition, and other algorithms the PR2 uses (among other robots) on most capable computers. And with the new AVR bridge (http://www.ros.org/wiki/avr_bridge http://www.ros.org/wiki/avr_bridge), you can even interface the "hobbyist" Arduino with the OS.
jerf 16y ago
It sounds like it is a development platform, not a deployable product. Development environments for the Wii cost much more than one Wii does, not that this metaphor is perfect.