PR2, mobile manipulation platform, Willow Garage, Inc., Menlo Park, California, USA

A robot scientist lays out the past, present, and future of robotics, and good for us, it’s more Jetsons than Terminator.

Produced by Brady Welch / Camera by Mike Seely / Editing and Sound by John Kane / Production Assistance by Jay Ramiro / Music by Phil Manley

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CSAIL graduate student Ross Finman is nominated by his former colleague Hordur Johannsson to take the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, but Ross soon discovers that Hordur is not the only one--or only thing--that wants him to participate...

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This work was done at the Search-based Planning Laboratory in CMU's Robotics Institute.

The birdhouse team (Ben Cohen, Mike Phillips and Ellis Ratner) got a PR2 to build birdhouses via a autonomous flexible assembly model.

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At the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI) earlier this year, the Haptic Intelligence Department at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, Germany, presented a paper on “Emotionally Supporting Humans Through Robot Hugs.” Their work explores how robots can be more effectively designed and taught to give the kinds of hugs that humans will love.

The research presented at HRI is an attempt to figure some of this out, by conducting a study where participants hugged a specially modified PR2 named HuggieBot.

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