Unbounded Robotics to Shut Down Due to Willow Garage Spin-Off Agreement (opens in new tab)

This is sad on so many levels. The founders worked so incredibly hard. They put together a groundbreaking, extremely complex, price shattering robot in less time than it takes many software projects to launch. The idea that an accomplishment of that magnitude might be lost due to a contract dispute is heartbreaking.

The only positive thing I can think of here is that I look forward to seeing what they do next, I'm sure it will be awesome.

About a year ago, I got to play with a UBR-1 prototype. It seemed to be very well-designed. It was smaller and lighter and the PR2 and had some design improvements. For example, the base was more maneuverable, and the torso and grippers were much faster. The main appeal of the UBR-1 was its low cost -- 50k for the UBR1 vs 400k for the PR2, or thereabouts.

Some of the most technically innovative robotics startups were acquired by Google last summer. Unbounded seemed like the only company left in the realm of mobile manipulator robots, who could continue Willow Garage's legacy of providing technology that runs on open-source software (ROS), is open to tinkering, and benefits robotics researchers. (And plenty more research is required before robots are intelligent enough for the vast majority of menial tasks.) I hope that Google will give back to the research community, but I won't get my hopes up, since they've been extremely secretive so far.

So I'm quite sad to hear the recent news that Unbounded is shutting down, and I'm hoping that the excellent work of Melanie et al. won't be buried due to the legal issues they're facing. (I have no inside info about what is going on.)

Willow Garage somehow pulling the rug from under Unbounded Robotics is a backwards move for this industry, which has always struggled to get decent forward momentum (being innovative electro-mechanical hardware, looking for early adopters, etc)

On a possibly related/speculative note, it seemed to me (when looking over the list of robotics companies acquired by Google at the end of 2013) that Google has been organizing a 'getting the band back together' thing. Obvious connections included Redwood Robotics and Industrial Perception, both also Willow Garage spin-offs. That, and one of the original founders of Willow Garage (Scott Hassan) was ex-early-Googler himself.