ROS did not become the standard for robotics software by accident. It was deliberately seeded, and the seed was a robot. In its November 2007 origin at Willow Garage, ROS was paired with the PR2, a large two-armed mobile manipulator the company built as a research platform. The strategy was unusual: instead of selling the robot and the software, Willow Garage gave them away. The Open Robotics retelling marks the starting point precisely: “It all started one fall day, November 7th, 2007. That’s when the first commit to ROS was made at Willow Garage.”
The cultural move that mattered was the PR2 distribution program. Willow Garage placed PR2 robots, expensive, capable machines, with leading research labs, and made ROS open source. A lab that received a PR2 received it running ROS, and any code that lab wrote, drivers, planners, perception, mapping, naturally targeted ROS and could be shared back. The robot was the carrier; ROS was what spread. Within a few years “supports ROS” had become a default expectation, and as the ROS website still puts it, the framework grew to span “drivers to state-of-the-art algorithms,” and “it’s all open source.”
Then the company that started it all went away. Willow Garage wound down in the early 2010s, the kind of ending that often kills the software a startup leaves behind. ROS survived because its stewardship had been moved to an independent home, the Open Source Robotics Foundation, later Open Robotics, which carried the project forward. The ecosystem had grown larger than its origin: by the time the Open Robotics team announced the final ROS 1 release, Noetic Ninjemys, they could write that in “almost thirteen years we as a community have made 12 releases happen together,” and that “ROS has grown up, perhaps more than anyone could have anticipated.”
That is the lesson of the PR2 and ROS. The robot was the vehicle, but the open-source community it created was the durable thing. A single company seeded a standard by giving away both hardware and software, the company closed, and the standard kept growing, eventually spawning a production-grade successor in ROS 2. The PR2 itself is now a museum piece. The ecosystem it bootstrapped runs much of the world’s robotics research.