PR2 Beta Recipients Announced!

The 11 recipients for the PR2 Beta Program have been announced! You can read the announcement on willowgarage.com.

While the program will leverage the common hardware platform of the PR2, it is also a big benefit to the broader ROS community as a whole. All of the participants will be releasing work as open source, and much of this work will be immediately applicable to other robot platforms. For example:

• KU Leuven will be working on improving integration between ROS and Orocos, as well as integrating ROS with other open-source libraries like Blender.
• JSK will be working on integrating ROS, OpenRAVE, and EusLisp.
• Bosch will be providing sensors like accelerometers, gyros, pressure sensors, and skins to participants, which will hopefully lead to new approaches and libraries for these types of sensors.

These are just a few examples, and you can read the announcement for more. There will be numerous libraries in perception, mapping, planning, manipulation, and more that we hope the ROS community will be able to build upon.

Many of the participating institutions have already started ROS repositories, including:

• alufr-ros-pkg
• bosch-ros-pkg
• gt-ros-pkg
• kul-ros-pkg
• lis-ros-pkg
• mod-ros-pkg
• sail-ros-pkg
• tum-ros-pkg
• usc-ros-pkg

These repositories and more will be very active over the next two years, and we encourage the greater ROS community to take part by using the many open-source libraries for ROS in exciting new applications for robotics.