- Yeah. Oh, they used to say, Willow,
we still see the glue marks.
The intern houses were pretty much directly across the road.
You could essentially walk in from that housing complex
and get into work.
(upbeat music)
- You know there was, we had this intern program
that was kind of legendary.
(upbeat music)
- It was just like this exclusive club
of awesome people doing awesome stuff
that maybe you could be a part of for just a little bit.
(upbeat music)
- You get a whole bunch of young people,
you bring them to someplace,
you teach them ROS and then you say,
go back to school and convert all your robots to ROS.
And that's what kind of happened.
(upbeat music)
For all the interns, Willow Garage was like a magical
fairy land of robots.
I mean, there was no ambiguity about that for interns.
- I mean, the intern program was huge,
literally and figuratively.
- The intern program kind of became the lifeblood
of building the community.
- They're like, what I get to like come
and basically eat free food and live with robots.
Yeah, I'm down.
- [Leila] In the summers, we often had more interns
than full-timers, so we would joke that like,
if there was a mutiny, we'd be screwed.
- You know, you'd see all these amazing videos
that they came out with and they'd be presenting
this incredible work at conferences,
and you'd be like, well, who are all of these people?
Like, how can I be one of these people?
(soft music)
- At the time, I thought it was just,
this is a cool opportunity to go to the Bay Area,
work with cool people,
work on my thesis a little bit more,
have a little bit of fun,
that was my mental state of mind at the time.
During the internship though, it was vastly different.
(upbeat music)
- [Man] That's hour 46 right now.
- The internship challenge, I believe, took place in 2009.
- They had one weekend to hack together a drink delivery,
and that's like no time to get anything done.
That was also when ROS was super rough.
- I mean, and the teams, all of them took it
with different levels of comic effect
because you got points for like if it talked to you,
or if it was witty, or how it delivered
the drinks and stuff like that.
- And so we all got into the kitchen,
we were setting up the robots,
interns were putting mustaches on the robots' faces
to get ready for Showtime.
- And Scott walks in and he's like,
and I brought a special guest.
- Okay, I don't know who this is going to be.
And then Larry Page walks in the door.
- Yeah, yeah, that was a trip,
and sure enough, Larry was like surrounded by robots
and a whole bunch of interns were like, okay!
(laughs)
I really hope this robot does what it's supposed to do.
(people chatting indistinctly)
- [Robot] Excellent choice.
- And somehow in one weekend with very little sleep,
they were able to pull off a whole bunch of demonstrations
of robots delivering drinks to people.
(upbeat music)
The intern program was amazing because of Melonee.
She put in the blood, sweat and tears
to make that an incredible experience for them
and to build them up as their own little community.
- Making sure they were all looked after,
not just from the point of view of like being junior interns
who needed some looking after, but more importantly,
from wealth supportive from a technical point of view.
- The intern program was my evil plan to spread ROS.
(laughs)
- [Melonee] Yeah, it's pretty crazy.
I mean, I think at the end we totaled it up
and there was close to 200 interns
that had gone through Willow Garage over the five years.
- We brought in, frankly, some of the best
and brightest students from around the world.
- We also were pretty active in pursuing
individuals that we thought were making an impact
in the open source community,
and we wanted them to come to Willow.
- One of the reasons students came to Willow
instead of Google or Microsoft or somewhere else
was because of the open source.
They got to work on their stuff.
- So that meant that when they were done
for the summer or whatever period they spent there,
they would go back to their lab and they would take
everything they built back with them.
- So this ROS, you know, organizational system
and all these contributions by top graduate students
became this core.
- Basically, there was this magic energy between these users
who at times outnumbered the engineers in the building,
just being able to go literally shoulder to shoulder
with the person building the part of Ross
that was breaking for them.
And it just got fixed and just got fixed
and just got better.
(upbeat music)
And that magic, when I really reflected on it, it was like,
I think the source, the core source of innovation
at Willow garage was that connection to the users,
it was just so organic.
- And that allowed it to spread all over the world.
(soft music)
- ROS had to be good to begin with and beneficial
to people, otherwise it wouldn't have caught on.
That being said, it was an opportunity for interns
to experience both the software and how it's applied
in the real world on the PR too,
so I think that combination of not only participating
in the development of ROS during the internship program,
but also using it in real-world situations
was very convincing.
- It was, they brought in new perspectives,
they brought in new code,
they took the ROS code and they brought it to their labs,
and then next thing you know,
everyone was using ROS on the robots,
and it was largely because they came to Willow.
Then they went back and they start ROS-ifying everything.
(upbeat music)