Radu B. Rusu

Done!!! Willow Garage proudly presents the first open source “beer fetching app” for robots!

Part of a 1-week project, together with a few of my colleagues, we programmed the PR2 robot to:

• navigate and find a refrigerator
• open its door by locating the fridge handle
• position the robot’s manipulators so that the door doesn’t close while grasping things inside the fridge
• automatically identify the types of beer available in the fridge (we trained models on about 9 beers - training involves simply storing a picture of the beer bottle you want to identify in a directory)
• determine the types of beer the user selected from a web page, compute grasping points, move the arms and grasp them, and then move the beers onto a storing rack that we installed on the robot
• close the fridge door
• navigate the the delivery point selected by the user on the web page
• identify people faces and perform delivery/hand-off beer + bottle opener
• wait for bottle opener and resume!

Optionally, the robot can open the beer too!

The entire source code is available at:
https://code.ros.org/svn/wg-ros-pkg/stacks/pr2_drinks/trunk/ .

If you find it useful, PLEASE let us know! Obviously this app is “powered by PCL”

You can read our entire blog entry here: http://www.willowgarage.com/blog/2010/07/06/beer-me-robot. Cheers!

Edit: I just noticed that we got picked by Slashdot. Some of the comments posted are pretty funny.

If you have no clue what the ESP game is, and are in the mood for a nice talk from Luis von Ahn, click here. He talks about the Internet, labeling images, etc. This particular talk is from 2006.

If you need more than one row of tabs in Firefox and are tired of scrolling left/right in your list, check out Tab Mix Plus. To add more than one row, go to “Tools->Tab Mix Plus Options->Display->Tab Bar->When tabs don’t fit width:” and set to Multi-row.

I’m back. After more than 2 years of zero activity, this domain finally gets a kick. Thanks to all who pushed me to do it. In the upgrade process however I became nostalgic, and decided to leave the old site as it is under http://old.rbrusu.com/. “No further updates or bugfixes though”.