Founded by Scott Hassan in the late 2006, Willow Garage is a technology incubator and robotics research lab dedicated to developing open source software and hardware for personal robotics applications. Willow Garage is a team of professionals in robot design, perception, machine learning and control, with a powerful theoretical background as well as a drive to create practical systems. The team specializes in human-robot interaction, perception, grasping/manipulation, task planning, and motion planning.
The company released its open source software suite Robot Operating System (ROS) in 2007. The ROS software is BSD-licensed, which makes it free to use and change for anyone, and free for any company to commercialize on.
Willow Garage believes in improving the productivity of personal robotics community, which is why it actively participates in research labs as well as companies as collaborators, partners, advisors and customers in the development of open source software and hardware platform.
