PR2 (Personal Robot 2)

🏆 Notable for: Serving as the definitive hardware testbed for the birth of ROS; many of the core ROS libraries (like MoveIt for kinematics) were originally written to make the PR2 function.

Overview

The PR2 was an advanced research platform that played the central role in the development and popularization of the Robot Operating System (ROS).

📜 History

Built by the legendary Willow Garage, the PR2 was designed as a standardized hardware platform for universities globally, so researchers could focus on software (ROS) rather than constantly building custom hardware.