Abstract. Personal Robotics research and development are accelerating. A growing community of open source developers is creating a Robot Operating System (ROS) platform that the broader research community can build on, to make the breakthroughs that will lead to new applications. Willow Garage is building a Personal Robot platform (PR2), which has two arms, a mobile base, and a rich sensor suite. This talk will review the current status of ROS and PR2, and discuss opportunities to join the ROS Open Source community.

Biography. Steve Cousins is the President and CEO of Willow Garage, an innovative robotics research company seeking to advance the state of the art in robot design, control and perception. Steve earned his BS and MS degrees in Computer Science at Washington University, and began his research career at the Medical Informatics Lab, at the Washington School of Medicine. He went on to Stanford, where he earned a PhD in Computer Science while working at Interval Research. From there, he went on to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Lab, where he led the Advanced Systems Development Laboratory. He later joined IBM's Almaden Research Center, where he became a senior research manager, before moving on to help start Willow Garage.