Eleven identical robots in eleven laboratories
Willow Garage gave away 11 PR2 robots worth over 4.4 million dollars in total to eleven institutions chosen from 78 proposals, together with a shared software stack.
Why it matters
For the first time eleven laboratories across three continents had not similar machines but literally identical ones running identical software. That removed the largest obstacle to comparing results between groups — the hardware stopped being a variable — and the same idea returns fourteen years later as the standard rig behind shared datasets.
Willow Garage received 78 proposals from around the world. It had promised about ten robots, and "it seemed a shame to give out only ten", so it made it a round eleven. The recipients were Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Bosch, Georgia Institute of Technology, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, MIT CSAIL, Stanford University, Technische Universität München, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, and the JSK laboratory at the University of Tokyo. Each robot came with the open-source ROS framework, on which the sites were to build and share their results. All eleven were unveiled at a party on 26 May 2010, where a representative of each site came forward to claim its robot. Berkeley, one of the institutions on that list, had already become known that spring for towel folding on a PR2, but on an alpha prototype at Willow Garage itself rather than on a machine from this giveaway.