Scientific American - January 4, 2011
What does 2011 hold for the field of robotics? Plenty, if 2010 is any indication. This will not be the year that mobile, artificially intelligent robot nurses assume the responsibility of caring for the world's growing elderly population, but it does promise to be a pivotal time for the development of the underlying technology that will enable safe and reliable automated eldercare, not to mention other services that robots are expected to perform in the coming decade. . . . "There are a lot of innovations in the PR2, but the most significant thing from my perspective is that it is a standardized, well-designed, well-tested platform that has a whole bunch of software that works right out of the box," says Charles Kemp, an assistant biomedical engineering professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "You never had that situation before." Kemp and his team at Georgia Tech's Healthcare Robotics Lab, which he formed in 2007, are focused on creating robots that can safely and effectively help care for senior citizens.  . . .Kemp's lab is one of 16 institutions that experimented with the PR2 during the latter half of 2010.  . . .Kemp sees the combination of his PR2, named Gatsby, and a free and open-source robot operating system as a way to accelerate his lab's work with the help of a standardized platform and a budding community of roboticists working with the same tools who can now offer more practical advice to one another. "We're actually releasing things that other people can use, and we're using other people's things," Kemp says.
Link to Full Article:  http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=personal-robot-research&