PR1

A blue and silver base with two vertical pieces units, each of which have a robotic arm in grey material and beige gripper end effectors.
PR1 helped jump-start a robotics revolution. Photo: Keenan Wyrobek

The PR1 (Personal Robot One), along with ROS (Robot Operating System), were designed to be a powerful and versatile robotics development platform for mobile manipulation research and application development.

Creator

Stanford Personal Robotics Program

Year
2008
Country
United States 🇺🇸
Categories
Features
Teleoperated PR1 cleans a room. Video: Keenan Wyrobek

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Did you know?

While testing PR1, the Stanford AI Robotics group broke the robot more than once every day for a week. That is why so much reliability engineering and testing went into PR2.

An inside view shows electronics packed into a blue frame that sits on top of a blue and silver base.
The guts of the machine. Photo: Keenan Wyrobek

History

PR1 was developed by Keenan Wyrobek and Eric Berger as part of the Personal Robots Program, led by Professor Kenneth Salisbury, at Stanford University. The goal of the program was creating "platform technology for research and development where robots do mobile manipulation tasks in human environments." The first prototype mobile manipulation development platform was the PR1. Following PR1, the PR2 robot was developed at Willow Garage. The program also originated the Open Source Robot Operating System (ROS).

The robot arm is seen on on a black background. It is mostly made of plywood, with some aluminum pieces.
Robot parts made with plywood. Photo: Keenan Wyrobek

Specs

Overview

Backdrivable, passive spring counterbalanced 7-degrees-of-freedom arms. The arms, grippers, head, telescoping spine, and mobile base controlled together at 1 kHz for fluid whole-body motion. Multiple onboard computers, battery system, and sensor head.

Status

Inactive

Year

2008

Website
Width
64 cm
Height
120 cm
Length
60 cm
Weight
98 kg
Speed
7.2 km/h
Sensors

Force control at every joint. Videre stereo camera system in head.

Actuators

25 motors

Degrees of Freedom (DoF)
23 (Arm: 4 DoF x2; Counterbalance Adjustment: 1 DoF x 2; Wrist: 3 DoF x 2; Gripper: 1 DoF x 2; Head: 1 DoF; Torso: 2 DoF; Wheels: 2 DoF)
Materials

Plywood and aluminum

Compute

Two Pentium M small form-factor computers

Software

ROS < 1.0

Power

2 kW power system with a 4- to 8-hour runtime depending mostly on computer use

Cost
$50,000