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.
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.
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).
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)
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.
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.
I used OpenCV in a bunch of college projects and had no idea it was the same guys who did ROS (used for my senior research project). Best of luck with your next venture!
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?
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.
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.