Open source robot: your next personal assistant

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.

Cousins showed a video of Willow Garage's first prototype, which moves on wheels and is "incredibly robust," Cousins said. "It has the ability to wander around any building that is [Americans with Disabilities Act] compliant and do useful things."

Willow Garage works closely with Stanford University's STAIR (STanford Artificial Intelligence Robot) project, and donated $850,000 to the Stanford Computer Science Lab. Willow Garage was founded by Scott Hassan, who helped Larry Page and Sergey Brin develop Google's technology.

With private funding, Cousins said making a profit isn't the primary objective. The project will be a success if it leads to useful technology, even if someone else ends up making the money, he said.

In Cousins' video presentation, the first version of the robot could be seen vacuuming, picking up toys off the floor of a living room, taking dishes out of a dishwasher, and most importantly of all, using a bottle opener to crack open a cold, refreshing brew.

Click to see: Willow Garage's robot personal assistant

While some robots have a sleek, somewhat human-like appearance, walking on legs instead of rolling on wheels, the Willow Garage machine looks like a few hunks of metal placed together more haphazardly than Rosie from The Jetsons. Looks aren't the same thing as functionality, however. Robots with human-like legs aren't all that useful with today's technology, so Willow Garage is waiting until the walking problem is solved before putting legs on its robot.