This is Tech

Slashdot posted a story this week about an open source robot project from a start-up called Willow Garage in the Bay Area. The company is working on an open hardware platform for researchers and tinkerers to build on. In order for large groups of people to contribute to a robotics project, it helps to have everyone working on the same hardware. Excerpt from the original article at Network World below:

Open source robot: your next personal assistant - Network World: “Open source robot: your next personal assistant
Start-up Willow Garage aims to make robotics useful to everyday life
By Jon Brodkin , Network World , 03/06/2008

Imagine a robot that hands you a beer and then cleans your kitchen and living room. That’s what a start-up called Willow Garage in Menlo Park, Calif., is busy developing. But the company isn’t going it alone: Willow Garage is an open source project that wants as much outside participation as possible.

One of its immediate goals is to build 10 robots and make them available to university researchers as a common platform that can be tinkered with and improved. Willow Garage will also supply ‘an open-source code base integrated from the best open-source robotics software available,’ President and CEO Steve Cousins said Wednesday at the O’Reilly ETech conference on emerging technology in San Diego”

(Via Network World.)