Open source robot: your next personal assistant  Start-up Willow
Garage aims to make robotics useful to everyday life  Meet
Willow Garage, the developers of an open source robot that will
hand you a beer and then clean your kitchen and living room.
Imagine a robot that hands you a beer and then cleans your
kitchen and living room. That's what a start-up called Willow
Garage in Menlo Park, Calif., is busy developing. But the
company isn't going it alone: Willow Garage is an open source
project that wants as much outside participation as possible.
One of its immediate goals is to build 10 robots and make them
available to university researchers as a common platform that
can be tinkered with and improved. Willow Garage will also
supply "an open-source code base integrated from the best open-
source robotics software available," President and CEO Steve
Cousins said Wednesday at the O’Reilly ETech conference on
emerging technology in San Diego.  Cousins showed a video of
Willow Garage's first prototype, which mov