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Willow Garage was a robotics research lab and technology incubator devoted to developing hardware and open source software for personal robotics applications. The company was best known for its open source software suite Robot Operating System (ROS), which rapidly became a common, standard tool among robotics researchers upon its initial release in 2010. It was created in late 2006 by Scott Hassan, who had worked with Larry Page and Sergey Brin to develop the technology that became the Google Search engine. Steve Cousins was the president and CEO. Willow Garage was located in Menlo Park, California.
Willow Garage shut down in early 2014. Most employees were retained by Suitable Technologies, Inc, while the support and services responsibilities were transferred to Clearpath Robotics. Willow Garage's website, however, remained open until April 20th, 2021.
The teams from the DARPA car program and the autonomous boat program were eventually merged into the Personal Robotics Program, which by the end of 2008, became the focus of Willow Garage.
In the summer of 2009, Willow Garage achieved the second of its milestones, enabling PR2 to Autonomous robot open doors, locate , and plug itself in. A video of this is available on YouTube.
In January 2010, Willow Garage achieved the third major milestone in the Personal Robotics Program releasing ROS at 1.0 and having PR2 ready for beta production.
At the end of 2010 with PR2 for sale and the ROS community on its way to 100 repositories worldwide, Keenan Wyrobek and Eric Berger left Willow Garage to pursue their next venture.
Willow Garage spun off into at least seven separate companies:
In 2012, the company entered into a joint venture with Meka Robotics and SRI International to found Redwood Robotics, a company specializing in robotic arms.
In August 2013, Suitable Technologies Inc. retained a majority of employees from Willow Garage to increase and enhance the development of Suitable Technologies’ Beam™ remote presence system. Willow Garage supported customers of its PR2 personal robotics platform and sold its remaining stock of PR2 systems until its shutdown in 2014.
In addition to spinoffs, former employees have created several other companies:
The PR2 has two 7-DOF arms with a payload of 1.8 kilograms (4.0 lb). Sensors include a 5-megapixel camera, a tilting laser range finder, and an inertial measurement unit. The "texture projector" projects a pattern on the environment to create 3D information for capture by the cameras. Willow Garage calls this "textured light", but this approach is better known as structured light. The head-mounted laser scanner measures distance by time-of-flight. The two computers located in the base of the robot are 8-core servers, each of which has 24 of RAM, for 48 GB. The battery system consists of 16 laptop batteries. The consulting firm Function Engineering performed the majority of the Mechanical Design of the PR2, under the direction of Keenan Wyrobek.
On May 26, 2010, Willow Garage held a graduation party in which the 11 PR2s were introduced. Some PR2s "danced" with humans while being led by their grippers. At least one party-goer attended by telepresence using the Willow Garage Texai remote presence device. Jonathan Knowles of Autodesk attended an XPrize cocktail party using a Texai to hobnob with Robin Williams.
Project Texai resulted in the Willow Garage spinoff of Suitable Technologies. Project Texai became the prototype for the product announced by Suitable in September 2012, the Beam.
In June 2010, Willow Garage made two-year loans of a PR2 to 11 research teams. Each PR2 included two arms, a "rich sensor suite", a mobile base, 16 CPU cores, and the company's free, open-source Robot Operating System framework, which controls the PR2 and comes with software libraries for perception, navigation, and manipulation. The teams were to have a chance not only to program a general-purpose robot but also to contribute their work on Willow Garage's open-source robotics platform to a broad community of researchers.
In August 2010, Willow Garage announced that the PR2 robot was available for purchase.
The PR2 is being programmed to make increasingly technical and dexterous applications including opening doors and folding towels.
3D models of the PR2 are available for many robotics simulation software. This allows users to visualize its 3D model, engage its joints and check its list of sensors.
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