Last month, we posted a video of Willow Garage’s PR2 robot autonomously navigating an office environment, opening doors, and plugging itself into standard power outlets. All of these tasks are deceptively simple, and in the above video two engineers from Willow Garage give a good account of just how difficult it can be to get a robot to pick up a power plug and get it into a wall socket. Tasks like these are going to be crucial to the development of flexible and reliable home robotics, and it’s fascinating to see evolution (for lack of a better word) in action.

For more details (on stuff like software and algorithms), you can view a presentation on Milestone 2 here.

[ Willow Garage ]

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