Willow Garage Spin-Off Introduces the One-Armed UBR-1 Robot

 Robotics  

Willow Garage has spun off a new company, Unbounded Robotics and today they released their first robot, the one-armed UBR-1. The robot has been built to aid both academic researchers and make business automation more affordable.

The team at Unbounded Robotics were happy and excited to today introducing UBR-1, a state-of-the-art ROS-based robot that is a little brother to Willow Garage's PR2 research robot.

UBR-1 looks to to do something the high-priced PR2 could never do - become a widely adopted platform across both acedimia and business.

With decades of robotic hardware and software experience, the team at Unbounded Robotics, made up largely of Willow Garage alumni,  have developed a mobile manipulation platform that offers advanced software and a sophisticated hardware exterior.

The one-armed orange and white robot is designed for human-scale tasks and comes pre-installed with Ubuntu Linux LTS and ROS, along with applications such as MoveIt!, navigation, calibration, and joystick teleoperation. The robot offers mobility, dexterity, manipulation, and navigation in a human-scale, ADA-compliant model.

The Unbounded Robotics team

A spin-off from Willow Garage, the Unbounded Robotics founding team consists of Eric Diehr, Lead Mechanical Engineer; Michael Ferguson, CTO; Derek King, Lead Systems Engineer; and Melonee Wise, CEO.

UBR-1 is priced at $35,000 USD. Unbounded be taking orders for the robot soon, and shipping the device in summer 2014.

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The team has done extensive software integration to improve the user experience; MoveIt! being the highlight of that integration. On the hardware front, UBR-1 requires no calibration at start-up, has a workspace large enough for the robot to reach the ground as well as countertops, and was designed with extensibility in mind so that users can easily develop custom applications.

As for the single arm, Wise told IEEE Spectrum, "If you look at the type of research being done today and the applications that people are using robots for, a lot of them only use one arm, and when we talk to professors that are using two arms with their robots, they came back and they said, "when I really think about it, I don’t really need that second arm, and I could just buy two if I really needed a second arm."

"As Willow Garage alumni, we realize that UBR-1 will undoubtedly be compared to the PR2 robot from Willow Garage. The comparison is logical in some ways: the teams’ prior experience with ROS and the PR2, along with expertise in advanced mobile manipulation platforms," state the company on their blog.

"As a platform for robotics, we are looking forward to seeing how UBR-1 is put to use in both R&D and commercial markets. Similar to an iPhone without any third-party apps, the greatest contribution of UBR-1 will be the output from the robotics community that is able to take advantage of this sophisticated mobile manipulation platform."



SOURCE  Unbounded Robotics

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