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Willow Garage is a robotics research lab and technology incubator devoted to developing hardware and open source software for personal robotics applications. The company is 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 worked with Larry Page and Sergey Brin to develop the technology that was the predecessor to the Google search engine. Steve Cousins is the president and CEO. Willow Garage is located in Menlo Park, California. ==History== 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〔(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,〔(ROS )〕 an open source robot operating system, and the PR2〔(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 (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〔(ROS at 1.0 )〕 and having PR2 ready for beta production. At the end of 2010 with PR2 for sale〔(PR2 for sale )〕 and the ROS community on its way to 100 repositories worldwide 〔(100 repositories ) worldwide]〕 Keenan Wyrobek and Eric Berger left Willow Garage to pursue their next venture. Willow Garage currently has eight spin-offs: *hiDOF, Inc.,〔(hiDOF, Inc. )〕 a software consulting company. *Industrial Perception Inc. - Acquired by Google in August 2013, IPI had as its broader mission "eyes and brains for industrial robots", focused on new robotic applications in logistics such as autonomous truck unloading. *OpenCV - An open source computer vision and machine learning software library built to provide a common infrastructure for computer vision applications and to accelerate the use of machine perception in the commercial products. *Open Perception Foundation – Their mission is to advance the development and adoption of open source software for 2D/3D processing of sensory data, for the benefit of the industrial and research communities. *Open Source Robotics Foundation - OSRF is an independent non-profit formed to support the development, distribution, and adoption of open source software for use in robotics research, education, and product development. *Redwood Robotics - A joint venture between Meka Robotics, Willow Garage, and SRI. *Suitable Technologies - Creating Texai, a remote presence robotic product. *Unbounded Robotics - Low-cost mobile manipulation platform. 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 will continue to support customers of its PR2 personal robotics platform and sell its remaining stock of PR2 systems.〔(【引用サイトリンク】 Suitable Technologies Retains Willow Garage Talent to Further Develop Beam Remote Presence Technology )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Willow Garage」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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