Willow Garage

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The US robotics research company that incubated ROS and the PR2, shut down in 2014.

Willow Garage was founded in late 2006 by early Google engineer Scott Hassan, based in Menlo Park, California. He funded a project by Stanford researchers Keenan Wyrobek and Eric Berger called PR1, and building on it the company developed the open-source robotics framework ROS and the dual-arm mobile robot PR2 (Personal Robot 2), giving away PR2 units to multiple universities so researchers could share code on a common platform. Willow Garage also funded the development of OpenCV and the Point Cloud Library (PCL). The Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) was founded in 2012 and took over ROS maintenance in 2013; the company itself shut down in 2014, handing PR2 support off to Clearpath Robotics. ROS remains the most widely used software framework in robotics today, which is its biggest legacy.

Related: Robot Operating System · Willow Garage PR2 (Personal Robot 2) · Open Robotics · OpenCV (Open Source Computer Vision Library) · Point Cloud Library (PCL) · Mobile Manipulation
Sources: ROBOTS Guide: PR2
Clearpath Robotics: Clearpath Welcomes PR2 to the Family
As of: 2014-01