Willow Garage made available eleven PR2 robots to research organizations that will make rigorous and creative use of the robot in existing or planned research projects. One PR2 robot was given to us for a duration of two years for our research proposal *Cognitive Robot Abstract Machine**, which aims at giving the PR2 the artificial intelligence skills and 3D perception to reason about what it is doing while it performs various kitchen tasks. These combined improvements will help the PR2 perform more complicated tasks like setting a table, emptying a dishwasher, preparing meals, and other kitchen-related tasks.

The objectives for the beta program in general are fourfold:

• enable scientific breakthroughs in personal robotics
• expand the open source robotics community
• develop reusable components and toolsloaded to us
• explore new applications for personal robots

Willow Garage’s goal is to facilitate progress in the area of personal robotics, and to develop a world-wide community of researchers and developers contributing to open-source. The Beta Program is a two-year commitment during which the selected institutions will pursue their various research goals and regularly meet to explore new applications together.

The PR2 Beta is a robust and capable robot platform with a mobile base, two arms for manipulation, a rich sensor suite, and sixteen CPU cores for computation. Each PR2 Beta comes with the free and open source ROS robotics framework that offers full control of the PR2, including autonomous navigation, manipulation, and perception libraries. Participants will build on ROS and share their results with each other more easily. These contributions will also be available to the wider ROS community to adapt to other robot platforms.