What Is PR2 Lite?
PR2 Lite a home-brewed robot that is meant to have all the capabilities of PR2 from Willow Garage. We wanted to create a robot that could be used like the PR2, but not cost $400,000 — the price of a PR2. We use ultra low cost components such as the $150 Kinect, the low-cost lidar used by the Neato robotic vacuum cleaner, servos with feedback such as AX12+ servos. ROS (Robot Operating System) provides most of the intelligence. I am part of a team composed of 4 high school roboticists and their mentor fathers.
The first prototype of PR2 Lite called PR Lite was featured in the front page article December 2011 issue of Servo Magazine!
We also have a second article in the August 2013 issue of SERVO Magazine, which I co-authored. This article deals with PR2Lite rather than PRLite.
PR2 Lite at Robogames 2012 – Photos taken by Tim Craig
Comparison with PR2:
As shown in the table below, the capabilities of PR Lite are analogous to those of PR2, but are lower quality.
| PR Lite | PR2 | |
| head camera | Kinect (2 cameras with LED texture projector for 3D vision) | 3 cameras with LED texture projector for 3D vision |
| base lidar | Neato | Hokuyo UTM-30LX |
| tilting lidar | Hokuyo URG-04LX-UG01 | Hokuyo UTM-30LX |
| arm DOF | 6 (shoulder pan & tilt, elbow pan & tilt, wrist flex & rotate, right and left fingers) | 7 (includes forearm and upper arm roll) |
| arm payload | 2.5 lbs | 4 lbs |
| number of arms | 2 | 2 |
| drive system | forward with differential steering; spin in place; sideways with differential steering | holonomic |
| torso | 12″ telescopic | 12.3″ telescopic |
| computer | i7 quad-core with hyper-threading, 6 GB memory, 60 GB solid state drive | two i7 quad-core, 24 GB memory, 2 TB disk space (all 2x) |
| network | 8 USB ports, I²C | EtherCAT |
| batteries | five 12v Lead-Acid; 30 min runtime | Lion; 2 hour runtime |
| software | ROS | ROS |
| joystick control | yes | yes |
| wireless | yes | yes |
| IMU | Sparkfun 6 DOF* | Microstrain 3DM-GX2 |
| arm cameras | webcam* | Ethernet camera |
* part currently not installed on robot
RoboGames 2011 demo:
This is a previous prototype of PR2 Lite called PR Lite.
Our PR Lite prototype was demoed at RoboGames 2011, occupying the booth next to Willow Garage and PR2! Our demo featured PR Lite’s arms mimicking a person’s arms. A Kinect used the OpenNI library to find the subject’s skeleton. This skeleton was transformed into spherical coordinates (with a radius), and inverse kinematics were used to position PR Lite’s arms. The arms were made from the Bioloid comprehensive kit constructed to be similar to two Crustcrawler arms. ROS packages from the University of Arizona were then used to control the arms.
Matthew Downing (that’s me!): prototype construction, CAD modeling
Andrew Downing: navigation, high-level wheel controller; his website here
Nathaniel Lewis: arms, Kinect
Robert Ou: low-level wheel controller, firmware; his blog here
Alan Downing, Frank Ou, and Michael Lewis (fathers): mentors and miscellaneous
