The Heaphy Project: Crowdsourced Robot Servants and the Willow Garage Spin-off That Never Was

Willow Garage, the now-disbanded Silicon Valley robotics incubator, unleashed some of the most impactful robot technologies of the past half-decade. Today, this formidable legacy lives on, in great part, through a host of Willow spin-offs that remain at the forefront of robotics. This article is not about them. It's about a Willow Garage project that was, at one point, on the verge of being spun out of the incubator, but is now all but forgotten. The project, called Heaphy, recognized that robots were still too limited in what they could do autonomously, and that instead of improving artificial intelligence, an alternative would be relying on more human intelligence.