Willow Garage, the developer of PR2, announces the immediate transfer of support and services responsibilities to Clearpath Robotics, a leader in mobile robotics for research and development.
Willow Garage’s development of PR2 along with the Robot Operating System (ROS) has produced the world’s leading mobile manipulation platform for research and development. Willow Garage will continue to sell its remaining stock of PR2 systems while Clearpath Robotics now becomes the sole provider of hardware and software support to current and future PR2 customers. Interest in PR2 systems should continue to be directed to Willow Garage through its portal at www.willowgarage.com, while members of the PR2 community should direct correspondence to www.clearpathrobotics.com.
“Willow Garage is committed to continue to support customers of its PR2 personal robotics platform,” said Scott Hassan, Founder and Chairman, Willow Garage. “I am delighted that Clearpath Robotics will be fulfilling that commitment at least through 2016.“
“The PR2, along with ROS, changed the pace of robotics research and created history,” said Matt Rendall, CEO at Clearpath Robotics. “We’ve been a champion of ROS since the start, so we understand and value the PR2 community and their work. We’re ecstatic to take on service responsibilities for this piece of history, and advance development within the community.”
The PR2 is a compliant mobile manipulation platform built by Willow Garage. Released for production in 2010, the robot’s safe, modular design spurred groundbreaking research in the fields of autonomy, mobile manipulation, and human robot interaction. The standardized platform enables researchers to share their work and leverage the open source software community (ROS); today over 1000 software libraries exist for the 40 PR2’s in use in over a dozen countries.
Clearpath Robotics has been a longstanding partner of Willow Garage as an early adopter of ROS, the first manufacturing partner for Turtlebot, founding sponsors of the annual ROS developers conference, ROSCon, and Clearpath’s CTO, Ryan Gariepy, is a founding board member for the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF).
In order to provide continued customer excellence for PR2 support, Clearpath Robotics is currently hiring Open Source Software Engineers.
Source: http://www.clearpathrobotics.com/