engineering

Willow Garage

Willow Garage is a engineering topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Willow Garage rather than just read about it. In short: 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.

Key takeaways

Willow Garage belongs to engineering; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Willow Garage to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Willow Garage from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

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 20, 2021.

History Willow Garage hired its first employees in January 2007, Jonathan Stark, Melonee Wise, Curt Meyers, and John Hsu. All four were recruited by Scott Hassan to work on Willow Garage's first projects which included an SUV entrant into the DARPA Grand Challenge (2007) and an autonomous solar powered boat for deploying scientific payloads in open oceans. In the Fall of 2008, Eric Berger and Keenan Wyrobek pitched Willow Garage on creating common hardware (PR1) and software Robot Operating System (ROS) platforms and the idea of creating a Personal Robotics Program at Willow Garage. They had previously started the Stanford Personal Robotics Program to build the platform technologies that would enable the personal robotics industry. At Willow Garage they led the development of PR2, the common hardware platform for robotics R&D, and ROS, the open source robotics middleware. 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 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 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:

hiDOF, Inc., a software consulting company. Acquired by Google in 2013. 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. Open Perception Foundation – Their mission is to advance the development and adoption of open source software for 2D and 3D processing of sensory data, for the benefit of the industrial and research communities. Open Robotics (formerly the Open Source Robotics Foundation) – Open Robotics 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 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:

Zipline co-founded by Keenan Wyrobek (former co-director with Eric Berger of ROS and PR2 at Willow Garage) delivers blood and other medical supplies by drone. Savioke led by Steve Cousins (former CEO of Willow Garage) produces a service robot for the hotel industry. Fetch Robotics led by Melonee Wise (former Robot Development Manager at Willow Garage) produces autonomous mobile robots for logistics and manufacturing. Fyusion led by Radu Rusu (former Perception Researcher at Willow Garage) produces a 2.5D image capture/viewer.

Open source software Willow Garage was maintaining Robot Operating System (ROS), the OpenCV computer vision library, and Point Cloud Library (PCL). These projects all use one of the BSD licenses, an open source software license. ROS development is now overseen by Open Robotics.

Robots

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Willow Garage

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Willow Garage claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In engineering, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Willow Garage before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Willow Garage ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Willow Garage

In research: Willow Garage appears in engineering research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Willow Garage in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Willow Garage is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 2006 establishments in California, American companies established in 2006, Companies based in Menlo Park, California, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Willow Garage outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Willow Garage in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Willow Garage means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Willow Garage out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Willow Garage in simple terms?

Why does Willow Garage matter?

Because it connects several engineering ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Willow Garage?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Willow Garage.