[3] It was created in late 2006 by Scott Hassan, who had worked with Larry Page and Sergey Brin to develop the technology that became the Google Search engine.

Willow Garage hired its first employees in January 2007, Jonathan Stark, Melonee Wise, Curt Meyers, and John Hsu.

All four were recruited by Scott Hassan to work on Willow Garage's first projects which included an SUV entrant into the DARPA Grand Challenge (2007) and an autonomous solar powered boat for deploying scientific payloads in open oceans.

In the summer of 2009, Willow Garage achieved the second of its milestones, enabling PR2 to autonomously open doors, locate power outlets, and plug itself in.

[17] In January 2010, Willow Garage achieved the third major milestone in the Personal Robotics Program releasing ROS at 1.0[18] and having PR2 ready for beta production.

[19] At the end of 2010 with PR2 for sale[20] and the ROS community on its way to 100 repositories worldwide,[21] Keenan Wyrobek and Eric Berger left Willow Garage to pursue their next venture.

Willow Garage supported customers of its PR2 personal robotics platform and sold its remaining stock of PR2 systems until its shutdown in 2014.

The consulting firm Function Engineering performed the majority of the Mechanical Design of the PR2, under the direction of Keenan Wyrobek.

Each PR2 included two arms, a "rich sensor suite", a mobile base, 16 CPU cores, and the company's free, open-source Robot Operating System framework, which controls the PR2 and comes with software libraries for perception, navigation, and manipulation.

The PR2 is being programmed to make increasingly technical and dexterous applications including opening doors and folding towels.