A robot that grabs beer out of the fridge, and more

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>> One of the things we're hoping to do here is use this robot to open a fridge and bring you a drink.

>> Sumi Das: That's the challenge facing these robotics engineers and Silicon Valley Startup Willow Garage. After three days of hacking, coding and testing, the moment of truth has arrived.

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>> Sumi Das: And it's a huge success. This robotics demo is just one of many, and part of a larger vision to build and test a platform for the emerging robotics industry.

>> Steve Cousins: Robotics is fundamentally really hard, and what we do is try to get the experts in all the different areas to contribute into one package so that it all works together.

>> Sumi Das: The robotics platform is made up of both hardware and software. The hardware is this 450-pound robot running two 8-Core i7 Xeon System Servers, each with 24 GBs of RAM and 2 terabytes of disk space.

>> Keenan Wyrobek: Fundamentally it's got all the systems you need -- onboard computers, capable arms, and a fully integrated sensor suite. Each of these sensors is good for sensing different types of things. We have two stereo camera pairs and a head. One is really for seeing people and your broader environment, and the other is optimized for seeing the things that a robot's about to pick up.

>> Sumi Das: When it comes to the software, the operating system is Open Source, so that universities, companies, whoever wants to, can write programs for the robot.

>> Steve Cousins: It used to be a lot harder to get a full robotic system running in your home or in your university. It's a lot easier now that there's a robot operating system where all the pieces are already integrated, and then you can extend it.

>> Sumi Das: Since Willow released the Open Source code and delivered 11 of their robots to some of the top universities around the country, robotics engineers have been hard at work tinkering. UC-Berkeley programmed their robot to fold towels. And you might have seen this on the web -- robots playing pool. Willow's own engineers created the program for this one. Ultimately, the goal is to build an industry that can further robotics technologies, helping us with household chores and taking care of us when we're sick. Cousin says, the industry is poised for growth.

>> Steve Cousins: I do think that we're getting much, much, much closer. If you think about it, 10 years ago, we didn't even have cell phones widely adopted. Wi-Fi wasn't around the way it is today. Today, a robot can be on wireless and move around in the environment.

>> Sumi Das: For SmartPlanet, I'm Sumi Das.

==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====