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 a

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".