We’re excited to announce that the one and only PR2 will be joining our botastic family here at Clearpath – what an honor! Willow Garage revolutionized mobile manipulation along with the Robot Operating System (ROS), when they released PR2 back in 2010. Now, as the company diversifies, they’ve selected yours truly to take on support and service responsibilities for the platform. When do we start? Today!
The personal robot
In case you haven’t heard about PR2 (which we highly doubt!), it’s an impressive mobile manipulation platform that has spurred leading-edge research and catalyzed the open source community. PR2s are in use in over a dozen countries and more than 1000 software libraries exist for them.
Excitement in the air
Our team rallied around PR2 at its unboxing here at Clearpath
We’ve always been huge supporters of Willow Garage’s work (ie: first manufacturing partner of Turtlebot, founding sponsor of ROSCon, early adopter of ROS …just to name a few), so adopting PR2 and being involved in the community at this level has got us over the moon. “The PR2, along with ROS, changed the pace of robotics research and created history… We’re eager to take on service responsibilities for this piece of history, and advance its development within the community,” said our CEO, Matt Rendall.
We’re not the only ones excited about this. Scott Hassan, Founder and Chariman of Willow Garage, said “Willow Garage is committed to continue to support customers of its PR2 personal robotics platform. I am delighted that Clearpath Robotics will be fulfilling that commitment at least through 2016.”
Continuing great support
One of our Autonomy Engineers, PJ, hanging out with PR2
To continue providing top notch customer support, we’re hiring Open Source Software Engineers. Let us know if you’re the right person for the role!