Quest Visual showcases Word Lens. The strange new world of Nanoscience, narrated by Stephen Fry. Xion protective gear - stuntpadding Demo. Someday You May Be Able to Grow New Teeth. Scientists create mice that sing like birds. Willow Garage Sells First PR2 Robots. Silicon Valley robotics company Willow Garage is announcing today that it has sold PR2 robots to four institutions in Korea, France, and the United States. These are the first PR2 units sold by the company, which hopes to make the robot a common platform that users in academia and industry can tinker with and improve, sharing their results and accelerating the development of applications.
Willow Garage, based in Menlo Park, Calif., has become the leading proponent of open source robotics. It has developed an open source software platform called ROS, or Robot Operating System, that is becoming widely adopted around the world, running not only on the PR2 but also on a variety of robots. The PR2 purchase means that the ROS community is growing stronger. The company developed the PR2 because it believed robotics researchers were burdened by the cost and time it took to develop their own robots and software. Each PR2, short for Personal Robot 2, costs U.S. $400,000. Woody Norris invents amazing things.