Milestone 2 Explained

A bit less than a month ago, Willow Garage demonstrated their Personal Robot 2 achieving the second milestone on their roadmap to building an open source, dexterous, mobile robot. They successfully demonstrated the robot navigating an office-like environment, opening and going through doors, and finding outlets to recharge its batteries. You can watch the video of the demonstration in our previous post here.

A few days ago, the Willow Garage engineers posted a new video explaining some details about how their robot actually works. In the video below, Sachin Chitta and Melonee Wise explain how the robot uses occupancy grid maps to navigate dynamic environments, uses vision and laser information to detect door handles and power outlets, and, finally, plan its actions to satisfy its goals.

Watching the video, I have to admit that it must take some serious effort to calibrate all these sensors. If the sensors are not calibrated and the relative poses among them are not known, it will be very difficult to fuse the data from them into a single, accurate estimate of the world's state. It would then be very difficult for the robot to act correctly in the presence of noisy sensors and actuators. In other words, I think achieving this milestone is not a trivial task and the Willow Garage team is certainly doing a great job.

The video explanation of how PR2 achieved Milestone 2 follows.