

Willow Garage shutting down - mjtokelly
http://www.willowgarage.com/blog/2013/08/21/willow-garage-employees-join-suitable-technologies

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TheLegace
I owe a lot to the Willow Garage guys, they started something truly game
changing in the robotics industry and for free.

I have used the ROS system extensively, developing my rover for the NASA
Lunabotics competition. One thing everyone should know about robots, they are
freaking complicated.

They have programs on every level of abstraction from low-level embedded code
to high-level executive task manager to create pre-defined behaviours.

ROS has gone through quite a few changes, and still has some huge architecture
changes coming to fix some of the short comings of the ROS protocol especially
for integration of embedded devices which robotics heavily rely on.

Unfortunately I'm not going to be doing much robotics anytime soon. NASA has
cancelled the competition for any International teams(I'm Canadian and we came
8th last year). And I'm not to keen on developing systems for DARPA.

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ngvrnd
They're not shutting down, they're merging with a sister startup. AFAICT, this
means: they won't be making any more PR2's. ROS is open source, seems like
lots of grad students are using it. Probably it will continue to be developed
and improved. Maybe it will become the "unix and C" of robotics.

~~~
mturmon
ROS has really influenced the way robotics research is done at the lab where I
work. A cohort of recent grads came in and replaced a lot of ad-hoc formats
with ROS bags. It's also being used to exchange data and standardize
interfaces in some DoD-funded work (i.e., not just student projects).

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lowkey
If I understand correctly, ROS development will continue and the core ROS team
are being migrated over to the OSRF, another organization started by the same
founder.

source: A friend works at the Open Source Robotics Foundation
(osrfoundation.org)

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ChuckMcM
Not entirely unexpected. That said, I really respected what the Garage was
trying to achieve. It is nice that most of the employees will transfer over to
suitable, I am sure that those that don't will be treated well.

I have used Willow as an example of the good that newly minted millionaires
can do when explaining to my non-tech friends how this area keeps going. It's
amazing to watch someone with a big chunk of change from their previous
endeavour to turn around and plunge it into new cool things. Non-techies think
that folks just buy a yacht and spend the rest of their days in the Bahamas
(or Beleize :-)) but the reality is people are driven to create cool stuff.

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spiritplumber
I'm sorry to hear that. I take no pride in the fact that my business survives
while theirs shuts down; they were doing good work and they were doing better
work than me in quite a few ways. Let a thousand flowers bloom.

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fatjokes
What will happen to OpenCV?

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colincsl
OpenCV is currently supported by Itseez so it shouldn't be effected

[http://itseez.com/](http://itseez.com/)

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danbmil99
What this really seems to mean, with the survival of OSRF & Beam, is that the
PR2 is end-of-life. That's a bit sad but maybe to be expected in this field.

What will take its place with respect to research into human-level, mobile,
autonomous manipulation platforms?

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gerberduffy
What does this mean for ROS then?

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iano
ROS development was handed off to OSRF [1] earlier this year. [2]

[1] [http://osrfoundation.org/](http://osrfoundation.org/) [2]
[http://osrfoundation.org/blog/ros-at-
osrf.html](http://osrfoundation.org/blog/ros-at-osrf.html)

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zek
I interned at Willow Garage for three summers and all I can say is that the
people there are really made the place what it was. They were amazing and I am
sure they will all continue to do incredible work no matter where they are.

