That video was part of a video competition sponsored by the robotics startup Willow Garage's founder. The Berkeley video won first place (and $5000). You can find the full listing of submitted videos (including the $3000 and $2000 second and third place contestants) on Hizook.com:<p><a href="http://www.hizook.com/blog/2010/08/21/pr2-video-contest-results-10k-aggregate-cash-prizes" rel="nofollow">http://www.hizook.com/blog/2010/08/21/pr2-video-contest-resu...</a>
That's faintly disappointing to me - a human can turn a sock inside out nearly instantly and without some convenient pole. The image recognition stuff about figuring out where to grasp it seems cleverer but it's still a little offputting to me because it all seems so contrived.<p>I guess I shouldn't be so down on it - there must be some pretty clever stuff in there. The image recognition problem seems harder to solve to me than the dexterity one.<p>I'm not sure where it becomes sexy. I guess the pole is faintly phallic, but as far as I'm concerned for a robot to be sexy it would need to look like Cameron out of Sarah Connor Chronicles. If the Berkeley researchers managed that then the future would really be here.