The bright people over at Willow garage have a penchant for programming and beer. So they decided to do something for the better of both. The result was PR2 a robot which seamlessly fetches cold beer from the fridge for its human masters.

The idea of the hackathon is to start hacking Monday morning and demo on Friday afternoon, using all of the existing ROS tools and packages. Sleep is highly optional.

For this hackathon, our goal was to make beer fetching as robust and user-friendly as possible. We also wanted the robot to safely transport the beer to any office, which requires navigation with the arms tucked. For safe beer transport we designed a bar-keeper add-on to the PR2 base — a four-holed foam block placed behind the robot’s base navigation laser. Three round holes are for stowing beers during navigation, with the fourth hole storing a convenient beer opener that the robot can pick up. Equipping our standard fridge with a tilted self-stocking rack meant that the robot could service many user requests without human intervention.

[Robot Shop]