CEO of Willow Garage Steve Cousins presented the company, its objectives and the main concept of current robotics applications to the ISIR lab at UPMC on November 16th, 2011.

During the meeting, ISIR presented its activities, and the HANDLE team presented the HANDLE project objectives and research. Guillaume Walck, engineer on the platform, described HANDLE project usage of ROS, the software suite maintained by Willow Garage. He talked about requirements of the HANDLE project in open-source software, especially ROS. He explained that the fast development curve induced by the open-source community efforts is a benefit for the project in terms of access to latest shared developments. The HANDLE project partners already actively participate in this community.

In answer to that, Steve Cousins also revealed a brand new, soon to be released, software package dealing with camera calibration that could be highly useful to the project.

The HANDLE platform was presented to Steve Cousins. He had several questions concerning the hardware, and was interested by the usage of ROS on the platform.

A few picture of the visit st ISIR (UPMC) Paris