Willow Garage Leadership Team

SCOTT HASSAN: Founder
Scott Hassan is best known as the founder of eGroups (a group email messaging company now known as Yahoo Groups), and was the key software architect/developer of Google, Alexa Internet and the Stanford Digital Library. Throughout his life, Scott has had a deep interest in Open Source software, computers and autonomy. These interests led him to start Willow Garage, a privately-funded research company aiming to advance the state of robotic technology in autonomous devices. Scott brings to his role at Willow Garage a combination of startup experience and expertise building large software systems using Open Source tools.

STEVE COUSINS: President and CEO
Steve Cousins is a seasoned executive, entrepreneur and innovator with a strong track record for managing research and development organizations and realizing a significant return on investment. Prior to joining Willow Garage, Steve was the senior manager of the User-Focused Systems Research Group at the IBM Almaden Research Center, one of the top human-computer interaction research groups in the world. Earlier, Steve managed the Advanced Systems Development Laboratory at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).

ERIC BERGER: Co-Director, Personal Robotics Program
Eric Berger is an experienced researcher with an extensive background in computer science and robotics. Prior to joining Willow Garage, Eric spent three years at Stanford leading the software and electronics development efforts on the Personal Robotics project. Other research projects have included developing the architecture for the STAIR (Stanford AI Robot) program in the Stanford AI lab, leading development of several force-controlled mobile manipulators, exploring robotic hand-shaking, and working on research projects in geometric computation.

KEENAN WYROBEK: Co-Director, Personal Robotics Program
Keenan Wyrobek is an experienced researcher whose background includes a strong focus on engineering design -- specifically multi-objective optimization in the design of complex electro - mechanical systems. His design expertise also includes haptic, medical and personal robotic systems. While at Stanford, Keenan spent two years leading the mechanical development efforts on the Personal Robotics project, resulting in the development of the PR1.

BRIAN GERKEY: Director, Open Source Development
Dr. Brian Gerkey is an experienced researcher and developer, with a track record of building open source communities around robotics software. Brian is leading the software development for the PR2 robot and is contributing to the design of the Robot Operating System (ROS), a community project initiated by Willow Garage and Stanford University. Before joining Willow Garage, Brian was a Computer Scientist in the SRI Artificial Intelligence Center, and a postdoctoral scholar in the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab. His research has covered a variety of areas, including mobile manipulation, multi-robot coordination, outdoor robot navigation, and computational geometry. Brian is also founding and co-lead developer on the open source Player Project, which produces one of the most widely used software platforms for robotics research and education. 

GARY BRADSKI: Senior Scientist
Dr. Gary Rost Bradski is a Senior Scientist at Willow Garage and is leading an effort to develop reliable object and pose recognition to enable robotic grasping and manipulation. Gary is leveraging his experience in robotics, machine learning and computer vision research acquired while working in Stanford University's AI Lab. Prior to joining Willow Garage, Gary organized the vision team for Stanley, the Stanford autonomous car that won the DARPA Grand Challenge race in 2005, and helped found the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Robot (STAIR) project under the leadership of Professor Andrew Ng. In 1999, while at Intel, Gary started the Open Source Computer Vision Library (OpenCV).

KURT KONOLIGE: Senior Scientist
Dr. Kurt Konolige is a Senior Scientist at Willow Garage, and Consulting Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. Kurt’s chief interest is real-time algorithms for robot perception. At Willow Garage, he is leading the development of visual navigation, stereo vision and 3D reconstruction from range data. Before joining Willow Garage, Kurt was a Senior Computer Scientist at the Artificial Intelligence Center of SRI International. While at SRI, Kurt conducted research in fuzzy control for reactive systems; in constraint-based planning and inference systems; in reasoning about perceptual information; and in real-time robotics and vision systems.