Willow Garage
| Industry | Robotics |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2006 |
| Headquarters | Menlo Park, California |
|
Key people
|
Scott Hassan (Founder) Steve Cousins (CEO) Eric Berger (Co-Director, Personal Robotics Program) Keenan Wyrobek (Co-Director, Personal Robotics Program) Brian Gerkey (Director, Open Source Development) |
| Website | www.willowgarage.com |
Coordinates: 37°27′08″N 122°09′58″W / 37.45224167°N 122.16618889°W
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 probably best known for its open source software suite ROS (Robot Operating System), which has been rapidly and widely becoming a common, standard tool among robotics researchers and industry, since its initial release in 2007. It was started in late 2006 by Scott Hassan, who had worked with Larry Page and Sergey Brin to develop the technology that was the predecessor to 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 first projects were an SUV entrant into the DARPA Grand Challenge and an autonomous solar powered boat for deploying scientific payloads in open oceans. In the Fall of 2006, Eric Berger and Keenan Wyrobek were recruited from Stanford to start the Willow Garage Personal Robotics Program. 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.
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