Beer Fetching, PR2 Style

As a follow up of our recent Beer-Fetching post, we are happy to report that the PR2 is making a remarkable progress in this area. The people at Willow Garage have been busy (and thirsty) programming the PR2 so it can fetch beer as dictated trough a web interface by their human masters. The project was completed in their latest hackathon.

The idea of the hackathon is to start hacking Monday morning and demo on Friday afternoon, using all of the existing ROS tools and packages.  Sleep is highly optional. For this hackathon, our goal was to make beer fetching as robust and user-friendly as possible.  We also wanted the robot to safely transport the beer to any office, which requires navigation with the arms tucked.  For safe beer transport we designed a bar-keeper add-on to the PR2 base -- a four-holed foam block placed behind the robot's base navigation laser.  Three round holes are for stowing beers during navigation, with the fourth hole storing a convenient beer opener that the robot can pick up.  Equipping our standard fridge with a tilted self-stocking rack meant that the robot could service many user requests without human intervention. - Willow Garage

The video below illustrates how the PR2 retrieves and delivers the cold tasty beer to the humans. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3Cq0sy4TBs Via Willow Garage.