New wisdom: According to Kazu Komoto, author of this article, sourced by ReadWrite, compiled by Xinzhizuo and reprinted without permission!
Throughout the world of science and technology, robots have become one of the hottest topics, and the San Francisco Bay Area is leading the robot tide: Savilee has created hotel butler robots; Fetch Robotics has built transportation logistics robots and received investment from Softbank; Technologies pioneered new technology for remote interactive robots...
But as everyone knows, the founders of all these companies have worked in a company, this company is Willow Garage.
Willow Garage's influence on the robotics industryWillow Garage was founded by legendary programmer Scott Hassan (he is the author of Google's original code) and is a robot R&D and incubation company. It developed robotic open-source operating system software ROS, standard robots PR2 and TurtleBot, and made great contributions to the robotics industry. Until 2014 it closed all businesses.
Nowadays, ROS has been widely used, including rescue robots in the DARPA Robotics Challenge, Baxter Robotics in Rethink Robotics, and BMW's self-driving cars. At the same time, it recently received support from Softbank Pepper.
With the booming of the robotics industry, robot hardware and software have developed rapidly and have begun to meet people's business needs. Taking hardware as an example, the development of human-robot interactive robots still faces many obstacles until 2050 due to limitations in the functions and costs of sensors and processors.
After recognizing hardware issues, Willow Garage developed ROS open source software to reduce software development programs.
Because of ROS open source software, the efficiency of software development has greatly increased. Even a small start-up company can develop complex robotic applications in the short term. Startup company Simbe Robotics CTO Mirza Shah stated:
Because of ROS, they built the robot Tally in just 18 months; before they expected this process to take a full 22 years.
Prior to joining Simbe Robotics, Mirza also joined Willow Garage's software development team.
Therefore, we can be sure that Willow Garage has made a great contribution to the robot industry. So how does such a wicked Willow Garage develop such an excellent ROS? How is it to train so many outstanding talents? Let us start with its history.
Robot Fans Favors the Personal Robot IndustryScott Hassan, the founder of Willow Garage, worked with Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page at Stanford University Labs. His project was to develop a Google search engine prototype. At the same time, Hassan released an e-mail service called eGroups and sold it to Yahoo for $432 million in 2000.
After this success, Hassan founded Willow Garage in 2006 and realized the great potential of personal robots. At that time, there were very few robots that people could see in daily life. One of them was iRobot's Roomba. However, Hassan firmly believes that generalized robots will be the trend and people will become accustomed to robots in everyday life.
Why does Hassan want to develop a personal robot? In the May 2010 PR2 Beta Program, he stated three reasons:
First of all, he feels that "the robot can improve people's living standards." After visiting Toyota's robot production line, he began to realize that if these robots go out of the factory, they will change the world.
Second, he stated that "high-level specialization and network connectivity are necessary because robot development needs to focus on engineers from different branches (hardware, electronics, software, integration)." In 2006, the market for non-manufactured robots was very small and no one was willing to invest in this field. In addition, he did not find another person who could combine professional, network connectivity and financial capabilities. From the sense of mission, he felt "I should do this."
In the end, his mother was a robot enthusiast and had a subtle influence on him. He loves robots and wants to build a home robot before the end of this life, but he clearly knows that alone, he alone can not achieve this goal, he needs to attract more people to join.
This is the reason for the birth of Willow Garage.
First change the world and then consider returnLater, Steve Cousins ​​joined Willow Garage and became CEO. Scott Hassan was an intern at Steve Cousins ​​when he was a student at the University of Washington. The two men began to lead their research team and were sponsored by related agencies. The sponsorship cost was sufficient to hire 60 researchers each year. Their purpose is to change first and reward second.
Hassan and Cousins ​​met Stanford graduates Keenan Wyrobek and Eric Berger, who were working on the prototype of the PR2 robot in the Stanford lab (when it was made of wood). After this, Hassan and Cousins ​​used their internal resources to develop PR2 and ROS.
After four years of hard work, PR2 was born in 2010. It turns out to be very popular. In this way, they began to change the world.
After the success of ROS and PR2, Willow Garage changed direction, used the results of research for commercialization, and his team changed from "robot researcher" to "robot entrepreneur." Hassan started investing in independent companies. Cousins ​​described the situation at that time:
In the end, the floodgates opened and many people came in.
Willow Garage has derived 8 companies. In 2013, two of them were acquired by Google.
Among the spin-off companies, the most exciting thing for Hassan was Suitable Technologies, because it created a new market: telematics robots. Hassan led Willow Garage's 10 employees and began to work on the development of mobile robots and remote control systems, and successfully developed the robot Beam.
At that time, Willow Garage lost $20 million annually. Hassan realized that the era of home robots to support everyday life is still far away. In 2013, he decided to stop investing and concentrate on the use of suitable technologies. The limit to his investment is not software, but expensive hardware.
After this, Willow Garage continued to support companies such as TurtleBot. However, recently it stopped supporting companies such as ClearPath Robotics. As for ROS, it was derived as a non-profit organization to continue the development of community leaders' developers.
The largest group of robotic entrepreneurs risesLater, many employees left Willow Garage. Although they had a short period of sadness, they soon regrouped and created their own robot companies with the knowledge and experience they learned from Willow Garage. Cousins ​​founded Savioke after leaving, and he said:
This is our Silicon Valley story. It seems to be somewhat non-mainstream. But we want to influence the entire robot world with our own strength, and I think we have already done it.
As a result, the largest group of robotic entrepreneurs in the Bay Area was born. From the basic techniques of computer vision and path planning for human-computer interaction to creating service robots that can accomplish specific tasks, there is a shadow behind Willow Garage.
In addition to creating his own company, the employees who left Willow Garage also entered various robot-related teams: such as the Alphabet robot team, the Robert Bosch autopilot team, and the Project Tango smartphone 3D scanning team. At the same time, many have also become self-driving vehicle developers and drone developers...
Although Willow Garage did not directly gain success as Google and Facebook did, it already had a solid soil and had sown a large number of seeds that would take root, germinate, and eventually bloom and bear fruit, affecting the entire robot world.
Via:Readwrite
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