Melonee shares how she first got into building things at a young age and how that led to studying mechanical engineering and leaving her PhD project behind to become the second employee of Willow Garage. She shares some personal anecdotes from the first few years at Willow Garage, including both successes like the PR2 and some less successful moments.

Melonee also gives her perspective on the development phase robotics is in now and what the remaining challenges are. Related to that, she discusses what is feasible to deliver in the next five years vs. what her dream robot would be.

You can support Robots in Depth on Patreon. Check out all the Robots in Depth videos here.

Ex-Willow Garage and Unbounded Robotics veterans get $3 million to bring mobile manipulator and mobile platform to market.

Funding came from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Shasta Ventures. Melonee Wise was named CEO. Fetch Robotics is the new name for FYS Systems. FYS stood for Fetch Your Stuff. The new name, Fetch Robotics, seems more appropriate for a materials handling logistics market line of products.

Things are moving fast at Fetch. They’ve announced that the first robots will be introduced in the second quarter of this year and are searching to hire up to 10 positions in addition to their present 10-member team. They will launch a research edition of the robot first and probably show it at ICRA in May in Seattle.

From comments made by CEO Wise to IEEE/Spectrum, it appears that they are making more than one product.

“One is a mobile manipulator and one is a mobile base, and they’ll work together. We’re targeting the logistics market, looking to do order fulfillment with robots.”

No pictures are available of the platform or the robot; the software however, will use and be built upon ROS.

Evan Ackerman said it best when he wrote:

There was a lot of interest in Unbounded and the UBR-1, and I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of interest in what Fetch is working on. It’s not often that companies get second chances like this, and I’m certain that the Unbounded core team (and the rest of the roboticists at Fetch) are looking forward to proving that they can deliver the next generation of mobile manipulators.

As advances in actuators, processors and machine vision enable robots to be mobile and do more, and do it safely alongside humans, many companies are working on and beginning to offer mobile manipulator robots. We wish Fetch well in their new venture.

For confusing reasons, Unbounded Robotics has shut down. Their $35,000 UBR-1 single-armed mobile robot that was shown late last year with great fanfare is no longer offered for sale.

“Why?” is the big question. Unbounded was one of the start-up spin-off companies incubated by Willow Garage. Unbounded’s UBR-1 robot was produced by the same team that developed Willow Garage’s $400,000 PR2 personal robot except that the UBR-1 only had one arm, used lower-cost building materials, and had a price of $35,000 – a phenomenal 1/10 the cost of the PR2! Both used the ROS open source robotic operating system.

At their launch in late 2013, they displayed and demonstrated multiple UBR-1s and described commercial applications ranging from material handling to picking up room service trays.

But early on there appeared to be a shift in focus to academia. It’s true that Rethink Robotics’ two-armed Baxter at $25,000 and UR’s one-armed UBR-1 at $35,000 are the cheapest robots with arms (and mobility with Unbounded’s UBR-1) available to the research community. Both offered SDKs so that applications could be developed and shared. But the academic marketplace is very limited and slow to purchase. Rethink is having some success on that front; perhaps Unbounded wasn’t.

In early July, things at Unbounded came to a halt. Principals changed their LinkedIn profiles and dropped their employment with Unbounded to “Previous.” The PR firm and other suppliers were told of the closure. An email from CEO Melonee Wise said that Unbounded was shutting down due to issues with the Willow Garage spin-off agreement which prevented them from raising an A round of equity funding. Perhaps there was an anti-dilution clause or a too-stringent IP royalty scheme that was a sticking point and gave pause to prospective investors. Generally these are things that get negotiated and resolved. Except in this case, to date, it has not been resolved and the closed doors are truly closed.

Evan Ackerman pondered the situation in an article posted on IEEE/Spectrum Automaton. Dan Kara posted a thoughtful piece for ABI Research wherein he postulated alternative reasons for Unboundeds closure, analyzing whether it was a failure, a non-negotiable clash, or something else.

Both Ackerman and Kara remarked on Unbounded’s achievement of providing a mobile manipulation platform at an affordable price. The UBR-1 was quite an achievement that sadly will not come to market.

PUZZLE PIECE #1:

At last week’s Xconomy Robo Madness event, we heard Willow Garage (WG) founder (and principal funder) Scott Hassan say that Willow Garage was alive and well and perhaps would focus on climate change and other massive social problems in the near future. This combined with the fact that WG has interests in all of WG’s 8 spin-off companies – two of which sold to Google late last year – suggests current and future income from those entities may fund new projects Hassen suggested. Or Hassan may supplement the funding himself with the same goals he had with WG: to speed up the development of service robotics by providing developmental tools such as the PR2 robots and the ROS operating system.

PUZZLE PIECE #2:

In a presentation about low-cost mobile manipulator robots by Melonee Wise, CEO of Unbounded Robotics, one of the 7 WG spin-offs, Wise described a WG project she headed which developed plans, renderings, simulations and foamboard prototypes of a line of mobile robots similar to her company’s product line. But she also described products not in the UR line, mobile bots with and without arms.

PUZZLE PIECE #3:

This brings up start-up company Savioke, not officially a WG spin-off, but all (but one) of the Savioke team are ex-WG people and Savioke CEO Steve Cousins was the CEO of WG. Savioke just got $2 million in seed funding and, although tight-lipped about specifics, says that they will have a mobile service robot available for trials by year-end. One of the funders was Google Ventures and last year Google acquired two of WG’s spin-offs.

Google Ventures GP Andy Wheeler said of their participating in Savioke’s seed funding:

As the lines continue to blur between industrial and personal robotics industries, Google Ventures is thrilled to be working with an exceptional group of people at Savioke. Steve and his team already have had a lot to do with moving the robotics industry forward. The next act promises to be even more revolutionary.

Savioke’s Steve Cousins said:

Hospitals, elder care facilities, hotels, restaurants, office services all provide large opportunities for robots to take on dirty, dull and dangerous work, improve process efficiency, reduce cost, and most importantly free up people to help other people, said Cousins to TechCrunch.

The Savioke website narrows his broad statement to focus on health care – to improving lives by deploying service robots in the places where people live and work, to use technology to overcome disabilities. This is a tough field to cover with today’s technology. Human-robot communication, speech recognition, vision, battery power, flexible mobility and navigation are all challenges that need to be conquered.

Resources:

Xconomy Robo Madness 2014 Takeaways: Jobs, Education, and Redefining Autonomy

I’m not saying this just because I’m biased by the recent news reporting on how large companies (Amazon, DHL, and UPS to be exact) are exploring the use of drones as a new delivery mechanism. If this is news to you, don’t worry. The robotics community came across this only a couple of weeks ago. Earlier this month, Amazon announced that it has been developing a drone-based delivery service called Amazon Prime Air that is meant to delivery items to your door in about half an hour. Then came a series of reports by other companies claiming that they are looking into similar ideas themselves.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98BIu9dpwHU

But these drones are not going to be flying above your backyard any time soon because the world needs to figure out how to regulate drone technologies first. Many people still associate the word ‘drone’ with controversial military technologies despite the use of drones for journalism, mapping and search and rescue missions.

That reminds me of another drone-related news story from this year: in April, a coalition of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) called the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots was launched. With a thorough discussion on the current use of drones (remote controlled), the organization argued in front of the UN that an extended, more autonomous version of the current robotic military technologies could be dangerous at a global scale. By November of this year, this group had already grown into the organization that got the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, talking about killer robots to the nations.

Of course drones didn’t invade the robotics news world all year long. Some of us may have forgotten this already, but Willow Garage, the company that enabled so many roboticists to adopt the open source mindset and stop reinventing the wheel with ROS and PR2, shook the robotics community earlier this year by shutting down (most of its employees joined Suitable technologies according to the last blog post from Willow Garage).

If I were to think about Willow Garage and the rise of delivery drones in a one-dimensional manner, it would seem that the state of robotics industry is in rocky waters, where there’s a lot of interest in making money using non-traditional robotics (i.e., not the stereotypical industrial robots), but it is still hard to tell how many of these new business ventures will be successful. But thinking of it in another dimension, I think 2013 was the year that demonstrated the complicated nature of robotics, not in terms of just the technical stuff that goes in it, but in terms of its relationship with societal, ethical, and legal issues — whether it be discussing the efficacy of open source robotics or societal acceptance of drones in civilian territories.

Read more answers →

It’s not every day you get to ask pioneering robot startup founders about their journey. The Robolution panel at the Pioneers Festival in Vienna comprised Rodney Brooks from Rethink Robotics and previously iRobot, Steve Cousins from Savioke and previously Willow Garage, Noland Katter from Anybots, and Walter Wohlkinger and Michael Zillich of Blue Danube Robotics, a new startup from Vienna University. Between them the panelists have started or spunoff well over 15 robotics companies, started the first robotics venture fund and been hugely influential in shaping the current rapidly emerging robot startup space. ‘Fast, cheap and out of control’ was Brooks’s 1987 insight into robot exploration of the solar system, but is very apt today, as drivers like open source software, affordable COTS and crowdfunding expand possibilities.

And here’s an excerpt from a great article on Robohub.org “Is this the right time for robotic startups?” by Torsten Andre who attended the event as a startup founder.

In the end, Rodney Brooks said that the trick is to find applications where robots can do something useful and the customer is willing to pay for it. Costing over $200,000, Willow Garage’s PR2 is probably not one these robots. But, as Steve Cousins points out, robots can also be built for approximately $15,000. Assuming a lifetime of two years, robots have to generate a value of about $20 per day for an investment like this to break even – something he thinks can certainly be accomplished. He expects robots to be present in our day-to-day lives within the next few years, making this indeed the right time to found a robotic startup.

Read more from our Startup Series.

Suitable Technologies Beam Remote Presence Robots

Two very visible things struck me as indicative of why the show was packed with enthusiastic exhibitors and attendees. One was the use of Beam remote-presence robots on the exhibition floor. Palo Alto start-up Suitable Technologies brought two dozen Beam robots to the show and rented them by the hour to people calling in from around the world. They worked flawlessly, moved freely and accident-free, carried on conversations with passersby and exhibitors – a perfect solution for those who couldn’t physically come and experience the trade show portion of RoboBusiness. There was even a Beam Hour where the show floor was closed to all except exhibitors and Beam attendees. A high-tech solution to broaden the high-tech audience of RoboBusiness.

Unbounded Robotics UBR-1 Mobile Robot

The other was Unbounded Robotics and their new UBR-1 one-armed mobile robot. Built by many of the same team that built Willow Garage’s two-armed robot PR2 – a robot that launched and sold for $400,000 in 2009, the new $35,000 UBR-1 is as capable as the older PR2 but it is now affordable whereas very few could pay for the PR2. This price drop phenomena was talked about by speakers and in private conversations. Words like “plug and play,” “convergence” and “confluence” were used to describe it.” “In just five years — from $400,000 to $35,000! Amazing.”

The UBR-1 appears to have encapsulated for all to see a major trend happening in robotics over the last five years: sensors, cameras, batteries and other component costs have been and continue to drop dramatically and, combined with mobility and ever-more-powerful CPUs, those lower costs are enabling cheaper more capable robots — such as Unbounded’s UBR-1.

With 2D and 3D sensors, scanners and cameras, more capable lighter and smaller batteries, and all the other functionality developed and incorporated in ROS and the PR2, Unbounded Robotics will begin shipping UBR-1 units next summer. First units will go to academia but shortly thereafter commercial versions will begin shipping to companies for various mobility tasks such as machine tending and material transport. After that, Melonee Wise, CEO, suggested additional application areas being developed for the hospitality business – mobility tasks like room service delivery and after-room-cleaning inspection. Other applications could include restocking shelves and, with the proper software, limited eldercare. The new UBRs will be manufactured and assembled in Silicon Valley. Unbounded is in the process of closing their “A” round of funding.

Invest, Innovate, Implement

“Invest, Innovate, Implement” was the theme for RoboBusiness 2013 and it was carried throughout with extensive speakers, panels and workshops. Funding methods and understanding what VCs think and want were a big part of the show. It started with a 3-hour workshop sponsored by Grishin Robotics, the start-up funding entity of the Russian VC Dmitry Grishin. It was followed by an evening session where a group of start-ups presented their elevator pitches in front of four venture capitalists. There was also a breakout session with VCs discussing today’s investment trends and how they view them in relation to investing.

ROS-Industrial

As costs come down and component systems become more capable, many companies are moving to add advanced vision and perception systems, path and grasp planning, and networking capabilities to their existing robots. One way to accomplish this is by having a ROS-Industrial front end – a common open-source language familiar to most engineering and robotics students – where one can design and simulate cross-platform vision systems and other additions before implementing them. ROS-Industrial, a non-profit open source robotics operating system organization, provides a common framework for robotics applications and is proving to be a good resource for rapid development of new components and uses for existing robots.

Google’s Self-Driving Cars

Google’s Chris Urmson, Director, Self-Driving Cars, a keynote speaker, showed not only the history but the complexity of the process of robotic self-driving cars. There’s a whole lot going on as a Google car moves along it’s path.

Notice the red circle in the left top picture. With 360º vision provided by the scanner, the car has to process every type of information, everywhere, including behind and around corners. In the top right picture, there are lights, pedestrians, lane markings, etc., all identified and color coded and tracked by the onboard computers. When maps are available, comparisons to what the car is seeing versus what the map says is there is another input to the massive data processing – 1 GB of data every second – that occurs thousands of times every second.

RoboBusiness 2013 had over 500 attendees and 60 exhibitors. Next year’s show will be held in Boston.

Unbounded Robotics today launched UBR-1, a robot that has many of us very excited. UBR is the first robot with intelligence, manipulation and mobility for below $50k. While UBR definitely resembles a smaller, cuter PR2, the UBR is actually more sophisticated. After all, the PR2 was developed 5 years ago and a lot has changed in robotics since. As well as being offered to universities as a research platform, the UBR can be deployed in business automation or logistics settings, like a Baxter but mobile. At one tenth the price of a PR2, and more sophisticated than any other similarly priced robot, UBR is going to move the goal posts for robotics. At this price point, with these capabilities, UBR is a disruptive technology and has potential in a wide range of scenarios outside of research. Some of the initial possibilities include office or medical delivery, warehouse picking and supermarket stacking and inspection. UBR plays well with people and is ADA-compliant.

There’s often a lot of hype in robotics and skeptics may ask if UBR can really deliver such incredible specs at such a low price. The answer is in the founding team: Melonee Wise, CEO; Michael Ferguson, CTO; Derek King, Lead Systems Engineer; and Eric Diehr, Lead Mechanical Engineer. The Unbounded Robotics team are Willow Garage alumni, who have been involved from the earliest days in building PR2, ROS and the Turtlebots.

Naturally enough, the UBR-1 mobile manipulation platform runs ROS. As the former Willow Garage team put it, “With decades of robotic hardware and software experience, we have developed a mobile manipulation platform that offers advanced software and a sophisticated hardware exterior.  The one-armed robot is designed for human-scale tasks and comes pre-installed with Ubuntu Linux LTS and ROS, along with applications such as MoveIt! navigation, calibration, and joystick teleoperation.  The robot offers mobility, dexterity, manipulation, and navigation in a human-scale, ADA-compliant model.”

On the hardware front, the UBR-1 requires no calibration at start-up, has a workspace large enough for the robot to reach the ground as well as countertops, and was designed with extensibility in mind so that users can easily develop custom applications. The extra value of the UBR will be all the applications developed by the robotics community, starting with researchers and flowing through to commercial app developers for enterprise and small businesses.

If you want to see one ‘in person’, UBR will be one of the stars at RoboBusiness 2013 in Santa Clara this week; a UBR will also be cutting the ribbon to open the Bay Area Science Festival on November 2. Unbounded Robotics are taking orders for the robot and expect to start shipping in summer 2014.  And I, for one, welcome this new uber robot.

To be able to choose between proprietary software packages is to be able to choose your master. Freedom means not having a master. Freedom means not using proprietary software.

– Richard Stallman, open systems advocate

Certainly robotics has its share of proprietary software and control systems. Each robot manufacturer markets their products based on the need for secure, proprietary and un-shared systems so that they can ensure stability and control. Whole industries have been set up to bridge those proprietary barriers so that multi-vendor solutions can happen.

Two prominent people in the robotics industry had a discussion on the subject last year. In a spirited cocktail party debate in Lyon, France at InnoRobo 2012, an innovation forum and trade show for service robotics, Colin Angle and Robert Bauer argued their points of view.

Angle suggested that freely providing such a key and critical component as the robotic operating and simulation system – and the extensive libraries that go with it – as the Open Source Robotics Foundation (previously Willow Garage) does with their open source and unprotected robotic operating system (ROS) – was tantamount to letting the biggest consumer giant(s) gobble up any mass market applications and re-market them globally at low cost because they already have (or could easily reverse-engineer) the hardware and could produce it cheaply, the operating system was free courtesy of ROS, and the only real cost was the acquisition of the application(s).

Angle thought that it was dangerous and led to losing a potentially American/European market to offshore commodity conglomerates, and said:

Robotics innovation represents a tremendous opportunity for economic growth akin to automobiles, aerospace and information technology. If we are to freely share our ‘intellectual capital’ on the open market we risk losing the economic engine that will advance our economies and send growth and jobs overseas.

The issue of losing trade secrets to foreign conglomerates has been a continuing focus at Bloomberg Businessweek magazine:

In November, 14 U.S. intelligence agencies issued a report describing a far-reaching industrial espionage campaign by Chinese spy agencies. This campaign has been in the works for years and targets a swath of industries: biotechnology, telecommunications, and nanotechnology, as well as clean energy. “It’s the greatest transfer of wealth in history,” said General Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency.

Bauer said that Willow Garage’s objectives with ROS was to stimulate the industry by enabling participants to not have to reinvent the many cross-science elements of robotics ventures; to reuse software because it saves developer time and allows researchers to focus on research. By giving them free access to the tools, libraries and simulation capabilities of ROS, and access to the PR2s that are available for testing and experimentation, Willow Garage hoped to advance the state-of-the-art in autonomous robotics technologies.

Bauer also said that, once a successful app was developed, at that point the new endeavor would likely lock down the operating system and application software in order to protect their invention.

Angle suggested that what the robotic industry needs for inspiration is successful robotics companies – profitable companies with millionaire employees selling in-demand products; not more notches on the oversized belts of big offshore conglomerates. Further, he said that unless ROS is protected and made stable and secure, it could never be used for sensitive (defense, space, security) solutions, and until it became rugged, secure and stable, it could never be used in factories, which cannot afford down time from either their robots or software.

Since that time, solutions that bridge the open vs. shut debate are showing up in many sectors:

• Willow Garage has transitioned ROS to two different non-profit foundations to continue development of ROS and ROS-Industrial: The Open Source Robotics Foundation and the ROSIndustrial.org.
• ROS-Industrial is a new effort to enable closed industrial systems to at least have a “front end” to make available the introduction of new sensors, make robot programing and simulation easier, and take advantage of the wealth of new talent exposed to ROS in academia.
• Start-up companies selling co-robots are using ROS and beginning to share application software. Danish Universal Robots and Rod Brooks’ Rethink Robotics both use ROS for software development but not for control systems. Rethink Robotics plans to offer an SDK capability with an app store for robotics applications shared by other Baxter users sometime in 2014. The SDK is already available in the academic version of Baxter.
• Industrial robot makers are beginning to provide ROS-like capabilities in the form of updated software and simulation suites, e.g., ABB Robotics recently introduced RobotStudio which is a GIS interface to ABB’s proprietary internals for robot simulation and programming.

Thus as the debate rages on, so too do the very pragmatic solutions that are necessary to make things move forward and work.

The best solutions often involve multiple vendors. Look at the Tesla factory. Integrating their software and control systems into the larger manufacturing system, or even between different systems on a line, involves serious and talented programming — a process that everyone agrees needs to be simplified and made less costly.

ROS-like products are fine for development and simulation, and because they are prevalent in most of academia, new hires are familiar with what it does and how it works. But that’s when those new hires are confronted with the complexities of proprietary software and teaching pendants. I’ve heard it said that it’s like going back to the mainframe era of computing. At the least, it involves learning old-style coding languages.

Most of the big robot manufacturers are beginning to make an effort to improve their training and programming methods, to get them onto more practical tablets, and to provide offline simulation. But the going is slow, hence the argument for open source rages on. The truth appears to be in the middle: older systems need to be updated and yet still retain their proprietary nature. Mix and match between vendors is a fact of life and needs to be accommodated either by the use of ROS-Industrial or by the robot manufacturers themselves in the form of a new set of standards and interfaces.

Read more answers →

Of course, I had an extra day to spend at Stanford University after the conference and couldn’t miss out on the event.

The fun really began when I got there. I was greeted by a gigantic inflatable Keepon, followed by booth after booth of robots. Among them were Puzzlebox, a robot controlled using EEG, PR2 from Willow Garage, and a self-driving car demonstrating LIDAR technology from Velodyne. With a lot of help from Dr. Peter Asaro, an expert in roboethics and professor at The New School, and my labmate Mr. Ergun Calisgan from the CARIS lab (University of British Columbia) I captured some of the highlights from Robot Block Party on video.

Puzzlebox:

Puzzlebox Orbit is a helicopter controlled using EEG signals. It was programmed to launch the helicopter whenever the user’s attention level goes above a threshold. As you’ll see in the video, my attention level proved to be quite intense for the Puzzlebox Orbit whenever I listen to someone speak.

Willow Garage:

Willow Garage‘s PR2 is one of the more sophisticated robots in the world today. In this video, Kaijen Hsiao talks about the robot and Willow Garage’s teach by demonstration studies.

Velodyne:

LIDAR is a remote sensing technology that is key to autonomous driving. I had the opportunity to speak with Velodyne‘s president Marta Hall, who discusses Velodyne’s technology and self-driving cars.

“Moore’s Law has never moved faster than is moving inside the phone you’ve already got in your pocket. The pace of development and the price performance curve is moving faster in smartphones than it’s ever moved in history and we’re taking advantage by drafting off this momentum and by employing military-grade technologies at toy prices,” said Chris Anderson at last weekend’s Engadget Expand event at Fort Mason, San Francisco.

The military has deployed 7,500 aerial drones; Chris Anderson’s company, DIY Drones, has got 40,000. Every sort of copter and plane, as shown on the diagram below, is included in the universal autopilot chipset that DIY Drones sells (for $129). And this chip also includes features like geofencing, follow me, and fly by wire.

Anderson’s fast-paced presentation is well worth watching particularly when he discusses how drones can be used for precision agriculture right now, today:

Chris was just part of a really interesting 3-person panel where the other two presenters were Marc Raibert from Boston Dynamics and Steven Cousins from Willow Garage. Marc Raibert is CEO of Boston Dynamics (of Big Dog and Cheeta fame) and described how and why Boston Dynamics builds robots designed to work in rough terrain. He emphasized what Chris said earlier, that military grade technology was moving to the robotics industry at toy prices subsidized by DARPA and smartphone buyers.

Amongst other interesting things Cousins discussed, he also answered the question about what is going to happen at Willow Garage now that the funding has stopped.

So, depending on who you ask, Willow Garage is shutting down, pursuing commercial interests, or changing direction. But things are not as dire as some may think: ROS is fine (the OSRF will support it) and there are many options for Willow Garage to explore. Personally I’m hoping it will be snatched up by Stanford or another academic institution and become a research institute. But given the number of robots they have out (and their price tags!), a commercial path into the future seems even more likely. In any case, I doubt that Willow Garage will disappear just like that.

What caused the changes is that Willow’s founder and funder, Scott Hassan, has decided that it’s time to wean Willow Garage from his private financial support.

I’ve never met Scott, but first and foremost I think we – roboticists and robot enthusiasts around the globe – all owe him a huge THANK YOU! I think it’s fair to say that if it had not been for Scott, we would not have universities around the world sharing a common robot operating system. And, looking at the amazing contributions on the Willow Garage blog, it seems clear that the past five years in robotics would have been a lot less exciting without ROS and Willow Garage’s robots.

Scott brought the model of impact first, monetize later to robotics. Together with Steve Cousins he assembled an amazing team of people and established a network of external collaboration far and beyond anything ever seen in robotics. Did it get us a household robot that can serve us a cup of tea? No. But WOW, did it ever fast-forward us towards that goal.

So thank you Scott, for your vision, incredibly generous financial contributions, and for leading with actions. Willow Garage has already had a huge impact, and I’m sure there’s much more to come. I’m greatly looking forward to the next steps of Suitable Technologies. We all have much to look forward to from Willow Garage’s other already existing spinoffs (convenience links below) – and, who knows, from Willow Garage itself in one form or another.

Change and innovation are usually good friends, at least in my book. In spite of all the negativity out there I, for one, think the future of robotics has never been brighter.

Official info:

• Willow Garage’s official statement: Willow Garage is changing
• The Open Source Robotics Foundation’s statement: ROS @ OSRF

Willow Garage’s spin offs (to date):

• Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF)
• Suitable Technologies
• Industrial Perception Inc. (IPI)
• hiDOF Inc.
• Redwood Robotics
• OpenCV
• Open Perception Foundation

• ROS (Robot Operating System) and ROS-enabled software packages and libraries can be found in most universities and research labs.
• The 50 PR2 research robots and development platforms around the world and at Willow Garage’s offices in Menlo Park have enabled countless roboticists and research labs to spend their time innovating instead of having to re-invent.
• The spin-offs abound as well: TurtleBot, OpenCV, Galapagos, ROS and ROS-Industrial, Suitable Technologies’ Beam Remote Presence System, HiDOF consulting, the detection and perception leading to the establishment of Industrial Perception, are all indicators of WG’s policy of spinning out entities with a sustaining business plan.
• Joint ventures like Redwood Robotics and Industrial Perception.

The PR2s around the world will continue to be supported and the recent establishment of non-profit organizations will continue the open source platform and libraries.

One of the most iconic and influential robotics companies has just let staff know that Willow Garage will be making big changes in the next few months:

Willow Garage has decided to enter the world of commercial opportunities with an eye to becoming a self-sustaining company. This is an important change to our funding model.

On the surface this is sad news, and I hope that we see a lot of attention given to the huge contribution that Willow Garage has made to robotics over their short but significant history.

Scott Hassan founded Willow Garage in late 2006 to accelerate the development of non-military robotics and advance open source robotics software. Named as an homage to the garages that spawned the computer industry, he envisioned an innovative research lab infused with the engineering expertise of a product development company. The goal was simple: to push the frontiers of robotics, both scientifically and commercially. Scott put together a funding package with the unique goals of impact first, return on capital second, with the strong belief that success in the first goal (impact) would provide plenty of opportunities to excel at the second (return on capital).

Willow Garage’s PR2 program has seen consolidation of high level robotics research across universities, a direction continued by the ROS open source initiative and the low cost Turtlebot research platform. Along the way, Willow Garage have also started Open CV and the Point Cloud Library.

In fact, Willow have successfully spun off 7 or 8 other companies or foundations, including Suitable Technologies, hiDOF, IPI, & Redwood Robotics, not to mention the momentum given to many individual careers and startups. They have generated a lot of business, and we’re seeing the down side of that right now. There is too much activity at the edge and not enough in the center.

Perhaps there doesn’t need to be. I see this really as a vindication of Willow’s goals, to push the frontiers of robotics forward and return on investment. They have succeeded, they have spun off and Willow as it was, is no longer necessary. Think of the incredible opportunities to start robotics companies in Silicon Valley right now. Maybe the future is rosier than it seems.

This video introduces TurtleBot 2, which was shown this past weekend at ROSCon 2012. TurtleBot 2, built around an iClebo Kobuki from Korean firm Yujin Robot, improves upon the original from Willow Garage. (Note that Sam Park, Executive Vice President of Yujin Robot, recently joined Brian Gerkey, Director of Open Source Development at Willow Garage, on the board of directors for the Open Source Robotics Foundation.)

The real story of our success was the roboticists, our robot mentors or demo coaches. These amazing people came early and stayed till midnight, even when their robot platform wasn’t being used [Elad Inbar of The Robot App Store and Ted Larson of Oddwerx]. Then they went home and built more robots to bring in [Tully Foote – Willow Garage]. They pulled apart their own personal robots [Melonee Wise – Willow Garage] to provide parts for teams. They flew in from far away [Ross Ingram and Adam Wilson – Sphero, Harsha Kikkeri and Jay Beavers – Microsoft Robotics] bringing boxes of robots and giving them away as prizes to the winning teams. But mainly they gave away their time, smiling. We were all inspired by the robot track, but it was the roboticists that really did it.

Harsha Kikkeri, robot mentor from Microsoft Robotics at MEGA Startup Weekend, April 13-15, 2012.
Photo/image credit: Erica Kawamoto Hsu

Rodney Brooks, from iRobot, recently said that the real question for robotics now isn’t “what CAN a robot do?”, it’s “what SHOULD a robot do?” Startup Weekend is a wonderful opportunity to test assumptions about what a robot should do, to do it rapidly, to iterate and to validate. While we had some very good robot businesses, the winning team, “Eyes on Demand” had an incredibly strong value proposition, achievable cheaply with available technology.

The team had a strong connection to a section of the community, people with impaired vision, and the team understood the real pain points, eg. reading mail or food labels. They started with a clear problem and then looked to available affordable technology and put things together in a new way. This democratization of robotics technology, as seen in the DIY drone community, is something we’ve all been waiting for.

Although world domination through robots and startups is definitely on our agenda, Robot Launch Pad is a small group in the Silicon Valley area just starting to grow. We were both touched and surprised to be contacted recently by Paul Doyle, Head of ACCESS, Research and Development at Hereward College, UK. Paul wanted us to hurry up and get people making real affordable robots for people with disabilities. He foresaw the possibilities of rapid prototyping and the startup movement.

“Hereward College in the UK supports many students with physical sensory and cognitive impairments. For years we have been awaiting the arrival of the practical assistive robot as many of our students could and should benefit from their availability.

What we have currently is a number of high cost ubiquitous machines, with little or no practical application in the real world.”

Paul wanted to know if there were any DIY robots coming in the future and to inspire us to build robot solutions based on affordable technology, easy for consumers and staff to work with and replace. Of course we still need sophisticated robots, but MEGA Startup Weekend proves that we can iterate around existing technologies, putting people centered design at the heart of robots. I was delighted to tell Paul about “Eyes on Demand”. He was thrilled too, and his whole college wants to be first customers. I think there’ll be quite a queue!

MEGA Startup Weekend was a MEGA success for robotics. And created a new hybrid event, a mashup of startup weekend and hackathon, with arguably the best of both worlds. I think I got Shacked Up this weekend.

What’s the best approach to building commercially successful robotics companies? Here are two arguments from two prominent people in the robotics industry:

1. Identify a need that can be filled with a robotic solution in a large marketplace and build a practical and specialized robotic product to satisfy that need.
2. Make it free and easy to design, program, simulate and test robotic applications and share your progress, problems and results with others all over the world using a common platform and the applications will come.

These two points of view were presented in a spirited cocktail party debate the other evening in Lyon, France at InnoRobo 2012, an innovation forum and trade show for service robotics. Here’s how it happened, who they were, and what they said.

Left: Robert Bauer, Executive Director, Commercialization, Willow Garage, a privately held corporation. Right: Colin Angle, Chairman of the Board, co-founder and CEO, iRobot (NASDAQ:IRBT).

I interviewed Colin Angle shortly after he gave a presentation about the need for robotic solutions in health care and asked him, amongst other questions, what he thought about Willow Garage’s ROS open source software concept. He said he thought it was dangerous to the industry and was fearful that it was also detrimental to the monetizing of the service robotics sector in particular.

Later I was meeting with Tim Field from Willow Garage when Robert Bauer joined the conversation. Bauer was a substitute Willow Garage speaker because Steve Cousins had to alter his travel plans. In his presentation, Bauer made the point that hardware was farther along than AI software and that AI, 3D and application software were where the robotics industry needed help.

Out of fun I told Bauer what Angle said and he became feisty and said he’d love to debate Angle as to which method contributed more to product development and commercialization.

Coincidentally, at a cocktail party for speakers, exhibitors and hosts that same evening, I was casually talking with Bauer when Angle came by to say hello to me and I introduced him to Bauer — and the fun began.

Angle suggested that freely providing such a key and critical component as the robotic operating and simulation system – and the extensive libraries that go with ROS – as Willow Garage does with their open source and unprotected robotic operating system (ROS) – was tantamount to letting the biggest consumer giant(s) gobble up any mass market applications and re-market them globally at low cost because they already have (or could easily reverse-engineer) the hardware, could produce it cheaply, the operating system was free courtesy of ROS, and the only real cost was the acquisition of the application(s).

Cover of 3/19/2012 issue of Bloomberg Businessweek magazine

Angle thought that it was dangerous and led to losing a potentially American/European market to offshore commodity conglomerates and said:

Robotics innovation represents a tremendous opportunity for economic growth akin to automobiles, aerospace and information technology. If we are to freely share our ‘intellectual capital’ on the open market we risk losing the economic engine that will advance our economies and send growth and jobs overseas.

The issue of losing trade secrets to foreign conglomerates was the subject of this week’s Bloomberg Businessweek magazine. Here’s a particularly relevant quote from the cover story – and keep in mind that the operating system mentioned was protected but hacked; nevertheless the story is relevant to this discussion:

In November, 14 U.S. intelligence agencies issued a report describing a far-reaching industrial espionage campaign by Chinese spy agencies. This campaign has been in the works for years and targets a swath of industries: biotechnology, telecommunications, and nanotechnology, as well as clean energy.

As the toll adds up, political leaders and intelligence officials in the U.S. and Europe are coming to a disturbing conclusion. “It’s the greatest transfer of wealth in history,” General Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency, said at a security conference at New York’s Fordham University in January.

[The article went on to describe the plight of AMSC, an American wind turbine developer, as they discovered that not only had their software been stolen, but Chinese companies had duplicated most of their component parts as well.] 

AMSC technicians tapped into the turbine’s computer to get to the bottom of the glitch. The problem wasn’t immediately clear, so the technicians made a copy of the control system’s software and sent it to the company’s research center which produced some startling findings. The Sinovel turbine appeared to be running a stolen version of AMSC’s software. Worse, the software revealed that Sinovel had complete access to AMSC’s proprietary source code. In short, Sinovel didn’t really need AMSC anymore.

… On April 5, AMSC had no choice but to announce that Sinovel—its biggest customer, accounting for more than two-thirds of the company’s $315 million in revenue in 2010—had stopped making purchases. Investors fled, erasing 40 percent of AMSC’s value in a single day and 84 percent of it by September. The company’s stock chart looks like the EKG of a person rushing toward white light.

Colin Angle has consistently held that we are going about developing the robotics industry wrong: “The idea that a humanoid robot with arms would push a vacuum cleaner is an image that has set many expectations and, in some ways, has set back the industry,” when, by just rethinking what needs to be done, we can build a product that satisfies a specific need (vacuuming), as iRobot did with their Roomba line of robotic vacuums. “I used to think that I was a self-respecting high-tech entrepreneur, but it took me becoming a vacuum cleaner salesman to actually have some success for my company, my investors and myself.”

Bauer said that Willow Garage’s objectives were to stimulate the industry by enabling participants to not have to reinvent the many cross-science elements of robotics ventures; to reuse software under the premise that by so doing it saves developer time and allows researchers to focus on research. By giving them free access to the tools, libraries and simulation capabilities of ROS, its many libraries, and access to the PR2s that are available for testing and experimentation, Willow Garage hopes to advance the state-of-the-art in autonomous robotics technologies. Says Steve Cousins, CEO, “We want everyone to work together. We’re happy having a smaller piece of the pie, but having the pie be much bigger.”

Bauer also said that, once a successful app was developed, then the new endeavor would likely lock down the operating system and application software in order to protect their invention.

Kiva Systems shelf-moving robots. They slip under the shelves, screw themselves tight, and then bring the shelves to the picker/packers.

Supporting Angle’s position to find a problem and develop a unique robotic solution is today’s news that Amazon has acquired Kiva Systems (for $775 million!). Kiva Systems is the company that turned warehousing upside down by using robots to bring shelves to the pickers and packers instead of vice versa.

To Bauer, Angle suggested that ROS itself could be locked down, protected, and commercialized now – and that it should be done right away – and that what the robotic industry needs for inspiration is winning robotics companies – profitable companies with millionaire employees selling in-demand products, as would happen if ROS privatized; not more notches on the oversized belts of big offshore conglomerates. But he also said that unless ROS is protected and made stable and secure, it could never be used for sensitive (defense, space, security) solutions, and until it became rugged, secure and stable, it could never be used in factories that cannot afford down time from their robots or software.

He said it would make him happy if all the people that displayed their robots at Innorobo were successful and wealthy, but that the opposite was more likely because the right big-market robotic applications hadn’t happened just yet.

The discussion went on and ended with Bauer inviting Angle to continue the discussion onsite at Willow Garage and Angle agreeing to do it.

I hope I have presented the two positions fairly because I think that both sides have merit. Using the analogy that developing apps for smartphones and tablets is similar to developing applications for service robots in the open source community of shared libraries, imagine how much talent is being squandered in the whimsy of making a fun app? Do we have to sift through the chaos and diversity of thousands of apps to find the few – if any – that are suitable for real business tasks? Or would we be better served to rethink how we satisfy real needs by building specific products to satisfy those needs?

What do you think?

1. Identify a need that can be filled with a robotic solution in a large marketplace and build a practical and specialized robotic product to satisfy that need.
2. Make it free and easy to design, program, simulate and test robotic applications and share your progress, problems and results with others all over the world using a common platform and the applications will come.

These two points of view were presented in a spirited cocktail party debate the other evening in Lyon, France at InnoRobo 2012, an innovation forum and trade show for service robotics. Here’s how it happened, who they were, and what they said.

Left: Robert Bauer, Executive Director, Commercialization, Willow Garage, a privately held corporation. Right: Colin Angle, Chairman of the Board, co-founder and CEO, iRobot (NASDAQ:IRBT).

I interviewed Colin Angle shortly after he gave a presentation about the need for robotic solutions in health care and asked him, amongst other questions, what he thought about Willow Garage’s ROS open source software concept. He said he thought it was dangerous to the industry and was fearful that it was also detrimental to the monetizing of the service robotics sector in particular.

Later I was meeting with Tim Field from Willow Garage when Robert Bauer joined the conversation. Bauer was a substitute Willow Garage speaker because Steve Cousins had to alter his travel plans. In his presentation, Bauer made the point that hardware was farther along than AI software and that AI, 3D and application software were where the robotics industry needed help.

Out of fun I told Bauer what Angle said and he became feisty and said he’d love to debate Angle as to which method contributed more to product development and commercialization.

Coincidentally, at a cocktail party for speakers, exhibitors and hosts that same evening, I was casually talking with Bauer when Angle came by to say hello to me and I introduced him to Bauer — and the fun began.

Angle suggested that freely providing such a key and critical component as the robotic operating and simulation system – and the extensive libraries that go with ROS – as Willow Garage does with their open source and unprotected robotic operating system (ROS) – was tantamount to letting the biggest consumer giant(s) gobble up any mass market applications and re-market them globally at low cost because they already have (or could easily reverse-engineer) the hardware, could produce it cheaply, the operating system was free courtesy of ROS, and the only real cost was the acquisition of the application(s).

Cover of 3/19/2012 issue of Bloomberg Businessweek magazine

Angle thought that it was dangerous and led to losing a potentially American/European market to offshore commodity conglomerates and said:

Robotics innovation represents a tremendous opportunity for economic growth akin to automobiles, aerospace and information technology. If we are to freely share our ‘intellectual capital’ on the open market we risk losing the economic engine that will advance our economies and send growth and jobs overseas.

The issue of losing trade secrets to foreign conglomerates was the subject of this week’s Bloomberg Businessweek magazine. Here’s a particularly relevant quote from the cover story – and keep in mind that the operating system mentioned was protected but hacked; nevertheless the story is relevant to this discussion:

In November, 14 U.S. intelligence agencies issued a report describing a far-reaching industrial espionage campaign by Chinese spy agencies. This campaign has been in the works for years and targets a swath of industries: biotechnology, telecommunications, and nanotechnology, as well as clean energy.

As the toll adds up, political leaders and intelligence officials in the U.S. and Europe are coming to a disturbing conclusion. “It’s the greatest transfer of wealth in history,” General Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency, said at a security conference at New York’s Fordham University in January.

[The article went on to describe the plight of AMSC, an American wind turbine developer, as they discovered that not only had their software been stolen, but Chinese companies had duplicated most of their component parts as well.]

AMSC technicians tapped into the turbine’s computer to get to the bottom of the glitch. The problem wasn’t immediately clear, so the technicians made a copy of the control system’s software and sent it to the company’s research center which produced some startling findings. The Sinovel turbine appeared to be running a stolen version of AMSC’s software. Worse, the software revealed that Sinovel had complete access to AMSC’s proprietary source code. In short, Sinovel didn’t really need AMSC anymore.

… On April 5, AMSC had no choice but to announce that Sinovel—its biggest customer, accounting for more than two-thirds of the company’s $315 million in revenue in 2010—had stopped making purchases. Investors fled, erasing 40 percent of AMSC’s value in a single day and 84 percent of it by September. The company’s stock chart looks like the EKG of a person rushing toward white light.

Colin Angle has consistently held that we are going about developing the robotics industry wrong: “The idea that a humanoid robot with arms would push a vacuum cleaner is an image that has set many expectations and, in some ways, has set back the industry,” when, by just rethinking what needs to be done, we can build a product that satisfies a specific need (vacuuming), as iRobot did with their Roomba line of robotic vacuums. “I used to think that I was a self-respecting high-tech entrepreneur, but it took me becoming a vacuum cleaner salesman to actually have some success for my company, my investors and myself.”

Bauer said that Willow Garage’s objectives were to stimulate the industry by enabling participants to not have to reinvent the many cross-science elements of robotics ventures; to reuse software under the premise that by so doing it saves developer time and allows researchers to focus on research. By giving them free access to the tools, libraries and simulation capabilities of ROS, its many libraries, and access to the PR2s that are available for testing and experimentation, Willow Garage hopes to advance the state-of-the-art in autonomous robotics technologies. Says Steve Cousins, CEO, “We want everyone to work together. We’re happy having a smaller piece of the pie, but having the pie be much bigger.”

Bauer also said that, once a successful app was developed, then the new endeavor would likely lock down the operating system and application software in order to protect their invention.

A version of this post originally appeared on Automaton, IEEE Spectrum’s robotics blog.

Imagine being present at the birth of a new industry. It is an industry based on groundbreaking new technologies, wherein a handful of well-established corporations sell highly specialized devices for business use, and a fast-growing number of start-up companies produce innovative toys, gadgets for hobbyists and other interesting niche products. But it is also a highly fragmented industry with few common standards or platforms. Projects are complex, progress is slow, and practical applications are relatively rare. In fact, for all the excitement and promise, no one can say with any certainty when — or even if — this industry will achieve critical mass. If it does, though, it may well change the world.

Bill Gates, Scientific American Reports

2008 Special Edition on Robotics

• Industrial robotics — wherein a handful of well-established corporations sell highly specialized devices for business use. KUKA, FANUC, ABB  and Yaskawa Motoman are amongst the mostly European and Japanese vendors providing handling, welding, cleanroom and assembling robots to the automobile, electronics and a few other industries. [According to the International Federation of Robotics in their annual World Industrial Robotics 2011 report, 118,337 robot units were sold in 2010 bringing the worldwide count of industrial robots in place and working to 1,035,000.]
• Service robotics — faster-growing, with start-up companies and research labs producing innovative toys, gadgets for hobbyists and niche products for healthcare, dairy and agriculture, home and yard, space, defense, security and surveillance, and scientific research. [According to the International Federation of Robotics in their annual World Service Robotics 2011 report, 2,203,241 total service-sector robots were sold in 2010 composed of 13,741 field or high-end service robot units (of which 45% were for defense applications), about 1.4 million vacuum and floor cleaners, 36,500 lawn-mowing robots and 753,000 entertainment robots.]

The diversity of the arguments are, to some extent, merited based on the unique needs of the various end users:

• Industrial, commercial, healthcare and defense users do need security, reliability and efficiency and robot vendors have a vested interest in protecting their value-added software and hardware solutions.
• Academics and emerging businesses need openness and sharing so that re-invention isn’t so prevalent as it has been in the past, and a full range of features and simulation capabilities are available so that far-ranging teams can collaborate on research projects using the same software.

Industrial robot control systems are complex in part because of the need to integrate the robot into the end user’s manufacturing system, partly because of the many algorithms which need to be processed to make the robot and all of its moving parts work, and because, up until recently, it was necessary to distribute the computing workload of the various activities of the robot, but also because control systems haven’t kept up with the availability of faster and more capable CPUs, connectors and communication methods. All of these are reasons leading to robot manufacturers becoming more OEM-like as most of them aren’t too capable in developing engineering solutions for new applications (thus their dependence on system integrators).

Service robotics, on the other hand, are more mobile and self-contained, carrying with them (or communicating via wifi) their control system functions. They tend to be either mobile or portable and either loosely connected to the end-user’s internal system or operate either autonomously or by modified remote control. Consequently, software like ROS brings lots of new capabilities which the original robot manufacturers are not able to do. Service robotic providers and research labs and facilities see the value and enjoy the benefits of shared open source development – they see it as good and useful for the overall robotics community — yet most of the start-up companies lock down their finished products so that end users are assured that their products are safe, secure and reliable and the resulting software is reduced to enable the product to fully function but not be overloaded with unused functionality.

• Commoditization of hardware, hardware modules, and software.
• Markus Waibel, senior researcher at Zurich’s ETH IDSC and participant in the EU’s RoboEarth library-sharing project, feels that there is a good chance that we will see a split into companies specializing in robotics software vs. robotics hardware in the near future. This is evidenced by the current trend toward modularization and commoditization of robotic hardware. This happened in the early PC industry and there are obvious benefits. “Actually, I would go a step further and argue that this split has already happened in robotics research, with most research platforms at least supporting [Willow Garage’s] ROS,” said Waibel.
• Tom Wagner, CTO of iRobot, says: “Open interfaces; not open source. That way 3rd party equipment and payloads can work harmoniously with iRobot and other robot manufacturer’s products while still providing a safe, secure and reliable product to the end user.”
• Many needed solutions have already been solved yet are re-invented regularly within academia, partly because of cost, partly to aid in the learning process and sometimes out of just plain whimsy.
• Forums for bringing together scientists, engineers, users and executives, such as the recent RoboBusiness 2011 event in Boston, attempt to thwart reinvention by being small and personal so that people have the time to explain their problems and explore various solutions. At that Boston forum, by having the time to meet and explore, one Boston agricultural startup was able to solve a vexing navigation problem by purchasing a solution module from another startup that had already solved that exact problem.
• Industrial robot manufacturers are beginning to shift into the service sector. At a recent conference in San Francisco, KUKA, a large industrial robot manufacturer, announced that they were proceeding along a path outlined in an internal roadmap to enter the service robotics business. Although no other industrial vendor has indicated similar intentions, the progression to enlarge their businesses by adapting their robots and robotic solutions into the service sector appears to be inevitable.
• Key points in KUKA’s roadmap are enabling mobility with SLAM navigation, making their robots lighter in weight, sensitive to their surroundings so that they are safe for nearby workers, and providing motion simulator trainability for future applications.
• Bosch also has a roadmap for developing robotic consumer devices that work within Bosch’s existing product family. Cost, safety and convenience are their primary concerns. A laundry app is a perfect matchup of technology and Bosch’s product line thus, at IROS, they were all over the Berkeley team that trained a PR2 robot to fold laundry.
• SMEs (small and medium sized enterprises) are seen as a major near-term market for robot expansion. This market needs easily trainable low-cost co-robots that are flexible and safe enough to handle multiple small-volume tasks alongside humans. This is the bread and butter application for SMEs. Incidentally, this is another example of robot manufacturers becoming commodity robot and module providers – in this case providing a large quantity of low-cost co-robots and letting the SME’s provide their own customization and integration.
• Big consumer product companies such as Toyota, Samsung and others, have announced their intentions to enter the medical robotics and consumer healthcare marketplace in 2013 and 2014. This may have as much positive impact on the service robotics sector as Foxconn is having in the industrial market (see below).
• Foxconn entering the robotics manufacturing business with their own manufacturing and assembly factories as clients.
• They’ve announced a planned deployment of 1 million robots within 3-4 years.
• Little is known of the details of the types, quantities or activities of the robots nor of the 500,000 human laborers that will be displaced.
• The Cloud is being introduced into robotics as it is in other areas of business – a way to offload processing and data to a place better equipped to handle the high number of CPU cycles needed to process vision, recognition, communication and navigation, most often simultaneously.

It is into this fray — this two-world ascendant industry of promise, fragmentation and complexity – that the question of whether a universal robotic control system is needed or not has been asked and not clearly answered.

There appears to be an obvious and logical answer:

• Robot manufacturers will soon enable open-source systems such as Willow Garage’s ROS to connect and front-end their proprietary internal operating system. Yaskawa Motoman has already done this.
• They will also enable an as-yet undeveloped universal interface so that using specialized devices and modules from various 3rd party vendors can occur.
• There won’t be a commercial version of ROS nor a universal robotic operating system.
• There will, however, within academia and the emerging service robotics sector, be a greater dependence and use of ROS because, as Markus Waibel says, “There are obvious economies of scale benefits – just have a look at the ROS contributors list and it is very clear that even now no single robotics manufacturer can match this brainpower.”

Willow Garage is out to make it happen in robotics.

They not only have developed a robot, the PR2, with sufficient dexterity to fold towels, and given eleven of these to research institutions around the world, but they’ve also released “an open-source, meta-operating system” for robots, called ROS, which you can download and use for free.

This is a great beginning, and could prove to be the seed of what develops into a standard platform.

Reposted from Cultibotics.