Robots for the Rest of Us

Steve Cousins

CEO of Savioke

Steve Cousins is passionate about building and deploying robotic technology to help people. Before founding Savioke, he was the President and CEO of Willow Garage, where he oversaw the creation of the robot operating system (ROS), the PR2 robot, and the open source TurtleBot. In the last three years of his tenure there, Willow Garage spun off 8 companies:

• Suitable Technologies (maker of the Beam remote presence system)
• Industrial Perception, Inc. (Acquired by Google in 2013)
• Redwood Robotics (Acquired by Google in 2013)
• HiDOF (ROS and robotics consulting)
• Unbounded Robotics
• The Open Source Robotics Foundation
• The OpenCV Foundation
• The Open Perception Foundation

Steve is an active participant in the Robots for Humanity project. Steve has been a senior manager at IBM’s Almaden Research Center, and a member of the senior staff at Xerox PARC. Steve holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University, BS and MS degrees in computer science from Washington University, and earned a micro-MBA while at IBM.