Thursday, March 1st
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Tour of Willow
Garage
Bob Bauer, Henry Evans, and
PR2
Executive Director of Commercialization, Los
Gatos Resident, and Robot Extraordinaire |
This tour will be held at Willow
Garage in Menlo Park. The class will convene in the front lobby at 4:30pm. Due
to space limitations, it is open to enrolled students only.
Abstract: Willow Garage develops
hardware and open source software for personal robotics applications. Willow
Garage's employees are a team of experts in robot design, control, perception,
and machine learning, with both a strong theoretical background and a
demonstrated drive to produce practical systems. Approximately one third are
robotics researchers whose specialties include: grasping/manipulation,
human-robot interaction, motion planning, perception, and task planning.
Researchers provide an institutional expertise to ensure that Willow Garage
stays at the technological forefront of the many depth expertise areas
represented in robotic technologies.
Willow Garage is only one part of the
open-source robotics community. They focus their efforts in ways that will make
the entire community more productive. Willow Garage actively engages research
labs and companies as partners, collaborators, customers and advisors in the
development of both their hardware platform and open source software. Willow
Garage also supports researchers who would not otherwise have the bandwidth or
funding to open source their work.
Biosketches:
Bob Bauer has over 30 years of
leadership in turning innovative technologies into profitable strategic
advantages. He joined Xerox's famed Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) in its
inaugural year of 1970. He led the System Sciences Laboratory and created
PARC's Advanced Systems Development lab, as well as managing Xerox Corporate
R&T investment and IP in software and systems. Bob has incubated and helped
create companies that leverage proprietary technology, each of which were
acquired for over $100 Million, SDL being the largest at $42 Billion. He is the
former VP and founding CTO of Xerox Global Services from 2002-06. In 2006 Bob
became CTO of H5, a San Francisco start-up that he guided to become the
NIST-certified leader in High Recall search. He is currently Executive Director
of Commercialization at Willow Garage, a Menlo Park company dedicated to
spawning and participating in the personal robotics industry. Dr. Bauer earned
MS and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford. He is a Fellow of
the American Physical Society and has been an adviser to the National Academy
of Sciences, National Science Foundation, UNESCO and Departments of Commerce,
Defense and Homeland Security, as well as numerous start-ups and VCs –
most recently as a Partnership Board Member at DeepBridge Capital LLP.
Henry Evans is a non-vocal Los Gatos
resident with quadriplegia as a result of a stroke when he was just 40 years
old. Following extensive therapy, Henry has regained the ability to move his
head and use a finger, which allows him to operate computers.
PR2 (Personal Robot 2) is Willow
Garage's first major robot. It is a two-armed wheeled robot of human size that
has two 7-DOF arms with a payload capacity of 1.8 kg. Sensors include a
5-megapixel camera, a tilting laser range finder, and an inertial measurement
unit. The "texture projector" projects a pattern on the environment to create
3D information for capture by the cameras. Its head-mounted laser scanner
measures distance by time-of-flight. The two computers located in the base are
8-core servers with 24 Gigabytes of RAM each. Sixteen laptop batteries power
PR2.
- Contact information:
- Willow Garage
- 68 Willow Rd.
- Menlo Park,
CA 94025
- 650/475-2810
- rbauer -at- willowgarage.com
- Lecture Material:
- Audio
58:46 - 13.4 Mb mp3 file
- Links:
- Willow Garage
- Robots for
Humanity
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