

Willow Garage: The Personal Robot Will Be Open Source - kkleiner
http://singularityhub.com/2009/06/22/willow-garage-the-personal-robot-will-be-open-source/

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endtime
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".

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pufuwozu
Thanks, I've been looking through their website for a while now (extremely
interesting) and wondered what their business model is.

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cmos
I'm hoping we will see an open source hardware revolution in many different
area's (consumer electronics is long overdue). It's so much easier when you
don't have to hack the bios.

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mildweed
I'm hoping we'll see an easily-hackable high-quality hardware trend, much like
the iPhone. Its a very solid product for 90% of users, but enthusiasts can mod
it out with just a little effort.

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erik
Unfortunately the iPhone isn't a great example of a hackable device. With each
new hardware revision, Apple has closed security holes and made it more
difficult to jail break your device.

