pr

PR2 robot learns to read, follows words anywhere

Since researchers around the world are experimenting with Willow Garage's PR2 robot, it keeps acquiring cool new skills like bagging groceries, doing housework, and handling beer bottles.

Recently, engineers at the University of Pennsylvania gave PR2 some literacy skills. As seen in the video below, it can roam the halls of campus reading out posters on doors and walls.

Menglong Zhu and colleagues at the university's GRASP robotics lab tinkered with a Kinect-equipped PR2 dubbed "Graspy" and taught it to recognize printed text on paper and signs as well as handwriting on whiteboard.

First, it locates text on a nearby surface (including the floor and labels on household products). Then it performs text recognition using Tesseract OCR software, and reads the words aloud.

Graspy can handle various fonts and text colors, but its reading isn't smooth or perfect, missing the digits "50" on one poster--perhaps because they were stylized.

The skill isn't earth-shattering, and indeed humanoid robots have been reading text and even musical scores for years. Still, it's cute to see Graspy exploring its new ability to read just like a child does. … Read more

One day a robot may ask, 'Paper or plastic?'

Willow Garage's $400,000 open-source PR2 personal robot is a jack of all trades, dabbling in household chores, bartending, and even playing pool.

Now, according to the IEEE Spectrum Automaton blog, a group of researchers from Stanford's AI Lab is looking at putting it to work as a cashier in the retail store of the future.

The primary goal of the research is finding a way for a robot to sort, grasp, and identify objects with minimal programming. To make this work, a 3D sensor on PR2 takes a picture, and from that single frame, the robot is able to use the raw depth data to pick up an item.

The team coined the phrase "autonomous checkout clerk," which is exactly what follows, as the robot locates the bar code by spinning the object in its hands, reading the numeric code, and then putting the item in a bag. No training or model programming is required, and the research revealed a grasping success rate of 91.6 percent when picking up 100 various items.

Just don't let it handle the eggs. As you can see in the video below, the integrity of the item is in question once it leaves the robot's mechanical hand. … Read more

Sony apologizes: A little late?

Many a relationship is held together by apologies. Somehow, acknowledging your own frailty, your own humanity makes you just a little more lovable.

Which is why it is strange that Sony, after a calamitous breach of its security systems, took 10 days before standing before its public and saying: "We're sorry."

According to Venture Beat, Sony executive Kaz Hirai attended a press event Sunday and immediately apologized. The personal details of around 10 million gamers have been stolen and there are already reports of credit cards having been illegitimately used.

Yet if one looks back to the … Read more

Ice laptops chill on streets of London

As PR stunts go, this one is pretty cool. So cool, in fact, that it's ice.

Inbay, a new U.K. tech support company, placed ice sculptures of laptops around London today to promote its online and telephone customer support services. Its first walk-in shop has also launched in London's Kingsway.

So where do the frozen laptops come in? Well, Inbay notes that frozen laptops hamper many a worker's productivity. So please stop sticking yours in snowdrifts OK?

The company offers a bunch of basic anti-freeze tips for mobile devices that we probably don't need to tell Crave readers: keep up on software updates; don't toss your clothes on top of fans or air vents; and restart your device once in a while to clear the cache and allow "forgotten" running processes to stop. And, of course, if you're typing on a keyboard made of ice, consider wearing gloves.

Steve Jobs takes health leave

Links from Tuesday's episode of Loaded:

Apple announces that Steve Jobs will take a medical leave of absence

Nokia ends its Comes With Music service in 27 countries

GoDaddy is ready to sex up its Superbowl Ads with a campaign to promote .co addresses

Groupon is in talks to partner with Chinese Internet giant Tencent

BlackBerry users in Indonesia can no longer access porn sites from the browser

Netflix upsets customers with a change to its service

Any beer left in that bottle? Ask a PR2 robot

The folks at Willow Garage are still hell-bent on creating the perfect alcohol-serving robot.

In July, they hacked their PR2 humanoid robot to make it fetch beer from a fridge. Now PR2 can distinguish empty bottles from full ones.

This is a significant accomplishment that can promote the well-being of lazy drinkers everywhere. We owe our thanks to Jivko Sinapov of Iowa State's Developmental Robotics Laboratory.

Sinapov and collaborators programmed the Menlo Park, Calif.-start-up's open-source humanoid so that it can determine the properties of an object by lifting or moving it around. The goal was to allow … Read more

Friday Poll: What will your personal bot do first?

As of this week, they're finally available to the general public. The helper robots we've been seeing in sci-fi movies for years are here to fold your laundry, wash your dog, care for your elderly relatives, and lie to your spouse--if you have $400,000, that is.

The open-source PR2 robot from Willow Garage stands about 5 feet tall, has two articulated arms and stereo vision, and is apparently very smart. The bots can be programmed to undertake tons of jobs using more than 1,000 software libraries, if you're up to the task.

Right now, the … Read more

Your own PR2 personal bot--for just $400,000

Like the idea of a personal robot that folds your towels and goes to the office for you?

Willow Robot's open-source PR2, which can pretty much be programmed to do anything you want it to, is now officially for sale, the Silicon company announced on its blog Tuesday. It'll cost you just $400,000.

This is good news for the (rich) robot-loving public, as PR2 was previously the purview of top research institutes tasked with finding ways to tout the bot's versatility (among them, the Georgia Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, … Read more

Reporters' Roundtable: How to (really) use social media in your business

On this episode of the Roundtable, we're talking about how to really use social media in your business. We're not going to say you should hire a bunch of "consultants" to tell you that Twitter will rocket you to success. Instead, we'll explore how to carefully, deliberately use your brand and your personality online to make your loyal customers more loyal and to spread the word to potential new customers.

And yes, the most recent and possibly most successful social campaign ever is the Old Spice program, which we will be talking about. Also, today: What Apple could have done in the social space to mitigate some of the brand damage caused by the problems with the iPhone 4's antenna design.

Our guests:

Brian Solis, founder of the branding and marketing firm FutureWorks. Now, there are hundreds of marketing and PR people in tech, and it's fair to say that most of them have at one point or another pitched me. Including Brian. But behind Brian's PR chops is a person who does more than pitch. Brian is one of the few branding and marketing people I've met in this business who backs up his approach with both a sensitive social radar as well as a real head for research and numbers. His books, Putting the Public back in Public Relations, and Engage, are thoughtful works on how to use social media.

And joining us from the real world (not tech): Rick Bakas, director of branding and social media for St. Supery winery. Rick is also author of the book, 75 Savory Tips for Social Media Success. Rick's real-world cred includes the fact that he's a Certified Sommelier from the Court of Master Sommeliers. He's also an old-school branding expert.

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Show notes and talking points… Read more

Summer = beer + robot that delivers beer

When it's too hot to even get off your ass and stick your head in the freezer, who ya gonna call?

PR2, that's who.

Engineers at Menlo Park, Calif., robot start-up Willow Garage have hacked their PR2 humanoid platform to make it deliver fridge-fresh, cool beer straight to their desks. The droid even wields a bottle opener for easy access.

PR2 can fold towels like nobody's business. While 11 PR2s are being loaned to universities around the world as part of an open-source research project, beer-fetching chops will doubtless make them more popular.

We've seen some … Read more