Willow Garage spinoff debuts robot ripe for picking
(Phys.org) —A mobile robot a little over three feet with one arm that can move around the building and watch where it's going made its debut on Sunday with capabilities and a pricetag that could eventually earn the robot a place alongside humans in the workplace. The robot is called the UBR-1, suitable for manual labor tasks such as picking and stocking shelves. Created by a young startup called Unbounded Robotics, the robot carries a formal description as a "state of the art ROS based mobile manipulation platform designed for robotics researchers and business." The ROS refers to the open source Robot Operating System that is the robot's framework. The big deal about the debut is that this is a robot small enough, with a small enough footprint, to take its place more easily than big robots on factory floors, in service environments and in research labs.