Willow Garage marks another milestone in its mission to create a personal robotics industry.

Willow Garage is proud to announce the creation of its latest spin-off: hiDOF, Inc., a software consulting company. The name is a play on the fact that the founding team has extensive experience with a high degree of freedom systems.

hiDOF?s Mission

hiDOF will be applying robotics technology to commercial applications, and is founded by Willow Garage engineers who believe in the power of using open source software to provide increased value to customers.

Over the last few years, hiDOF?s founders have authored and maintained many of the core ROS tools, and programmed the PR2 to do everything from recharging itself to fetching beer. Now, with hiDOF, they are excited to leverage these tools to solve real-world problems, while providing the community with battle-tested code.

The hiDOF team is available for a variety of consulting and contracting services. If you have a difficult automation problem that requires greater flexibility, hiDOF can help. hiDOF also provides extensive technology transfer services. They can harden an algorithm, optimize an approach, or create an amazing technology demonstration.

Redefining Automation

hiDOF is ready to take on difficult automation challenges that others can’t solve. hiDOF believes that industrial automation is on the cusp of a revolution in flexibility, robustness, and safety.

The hiDOF team leverages ROS to solve complex problems quickly. The founding team authored many of the core components of ROS, giving hiDOF a wealth of deep expertise and knowledge across the entire ROS ecosystem. They can build everything from drivers and controllers all the way through high-level capabilities like navigation and manipulation.

Harnessing the Cloud

hiDOF has experience building large, scalable cloud solutions.

For more information, or if are interested in talking through a potential project, please contact the team at [email protected]. You can also visit their website at hiDOF, Inc.

Creating an Industry

Since Willow Garage was founded in 2006, there have now been seven spin-offs. Given that our goal is to create a new robotics industry, we think seven new companies in six years is a pretty good start. Those companies are:

• Industrial Perception Inc. – IPI is working on integrating perception technology with industrial robots.
• OpenCV – An open source computer vision and machine learning software library built to provide a common infrastructure for computer vision applications and to accelerate the use of machine perception in the commercial products.
• Open Perception Foundation ? Their mission is to advance the development and adoption of open source software for 2D/3D processing of sensory data, for the benefit of the industrial and research communities.
• Open Source Robotics Foundation – OSRF is an independent non-profit formed to support the development, distribution, and adoption of open source software for use in robotics research, education, and product development.
• Redwood Robotics – A joint venture between Meka Robotics, Willow Garage, and SRI.
• Suitable Technologies – Creating an innovative new remote presence product.