| Industry | Robotics |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2006 |
| Headquarters | Menlo Park, California |
| Key people | Steve Cousins (CEO) Scott Hassan (founder) Brian Gerkey (Director, Open Source Development) Gary Bradski (Senior Scientist) Kurt Konolige (Senior Scientist) |
| Website | www.willowgarage.com |
Willow Garage is a robotics research lab and technology incubator devoted to developing hardware and open source software for personal robotics applications.[1] It was started in late 2006 by Scott Hassan, an early Google employee who helped develop Google's technology.[2][3] Steve Cousins is the president and CEO. Willow Garage is located in Menlo Park, California.[4]
Willow Garage's first projects were an SUV entrant into the DARPA Grand Challenge and an autonomous solar powered boat for deploying scientific payloads in open oceans.[5] In the Fall of 2009, Eric Berger and Keenan Wyrobek were recruited from Stanford to start the Willow Garage Personal Robotics Program.[6] They founded the Stanford Personal Robotics Program to build prototypes for the platform technologies that would enable the personal robotics industry. At Willow Garage they continued to execute on that mission with ROS, an open source robot operating system, and the PR2 robotics development platform.
The teams from the DARPA car program and the autonomous boat program were eventually rolled 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 their milestones, enabling PR2 to autonomously open doors, locate power outlets, and plug itself in[7][8][9] (a video of this is available on YouTube[10]).
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.[11]
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.
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Willow Garage is maintaining ROS (Robot Operating System),[12][13] the OpenCV computer vision library,[14] and PCL (Point Cloud Library).[15] These projects all use the BSD license, an open source software license.
Willow Garage's first major robot is called PR2. It is a two-armed wheeled robot of size similar to a human. They plan to release it to the public to be used for academic and industrial robotics research.[16] PR2 is a spinoff of PR1, a robotics platform being developed at Stanford University. PR stands for "personal robot".[17][18]
The PR2 has two 7-DOF arms with a payload of 1.8 kg. 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.[19] 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 with 24 Gigabytes of RAM for a total of 48 GB. The battery system consists of 16 laptop batteries.[20]
On May 26, 2010, Willow Garage [21] 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 robot.[22][23] Jonathan Knowles of Autodesk attended an XPrize cocktail party using a Texai to hobnob with Robin Williams.[24]
In June, 2010 Willow Garage made two-year loans of a PR2; having two arms, a "rich sensor suite," a mobile base, 16 CPU cores, and their free, open-source Robot Operating System (ROS) framework that controls the PR2 and that comes with software libraries for perception, navigation, and manipulation. The 11 research teams will have a chance not only to program a general-purpose robot but also to contribute the work they've done on Willow Garage's open-source robotics platform to a wide community of researchers.[25]