This week’s FLOSS4Science interview is with Steve Cousins, President and CEO of Willow Garage, creators of the PR2 robot and the TurtleBot, both based on the open source ROS (Robot Operating System) platform. Roboticists, enjoy the interview!

Robot Reviews: "10 lucky research organizations will stand to benefit from Willow Garage's PR2 Beta Program, under which they will each be granted free use of one PR2 robot and earn the privilege to participate in the advancement of open source robotics development."

A California startup is working with the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Robot project to create an open-source robot. The demo version can do some neat stuff, but the real payoff will come once the AI is perfected and it leaves the labs.

This is the ranger SRV robot ('Satcam Robotic Vehicle') is a rugged robot based on the surveyor open source robot. It can be remote controlled over the internet or programmed for autonomous missions.

Looking for a cheap DIY Linux robot? This is the Linux PC robot project. The objective of LinuxPCRobot is to build a fully functional robotic development platform for $500 or less using linux, commonly available components, a little skill, and some good old fashioned scrounging.

The personal robot market will be worth $15 billion annually by 2015, according to an ABI report. Most personal robots shipping today use proprietary OSes, although Linux is slowly migrating from the commercial to the consumer robot market, according to an ABI analyst.

Personal computers were supposed to make our lives easier. Instead, these beasts have turned us all into part-time IT administrators, our lives given over to downloading upgrades, installing patches and updates and drivers and antispyware, decrypting error messages and screaming at stalled applications. Enough! The folks at Zonbu, a tiny firm in Menlo Park, Calif., think they've produced the answer...

Every geeks dream is to have a personal robot that can be programmed to perform various tasks. If you have seen Tony Stark's robotic assistants in the movie Iron Man then you probably know what I mean. But unlike in movies, today's robots are not as advanced or still have limited capabilities.

Robots can be about as complex a machine as you're ever likely to encounter, but roboticists spend a lot of time solving mundane problems that have already been solved countless times by other robot makers.