While PR-2 units trickled out, ROS exploded. Wise had written a deep well of tutorials that made the software unusually accessible. She also founded and ran a large internship program. At the end of the summer, the interns returned to their universities and spread the operating system like a virus. ROS is still the brain of diverse robots all over the world.

Wise then went on to build TurtleBot: a short, cylindrical robot on wheels that uses a Kinect to see its surroundings. Institutions can buy dozens of $1,000 TurtleBots for the price of a single, more complex robot. Willow Garage, and now the Open Source Robotics Foundation, have sold thousands.

“Willow had a big impact, and Melonee had a big impact on Willow,” says Steve Cousins, who was CEO of Willow Garage from 2007 to 2013. “(Hassan) saw she was going places. She’s got the eye of the tiger.”

Yet Willow Garage still wasn’t commercially viable, and the team spent the next year and a half searching for a way forward. Wise moved into a management role as the lab considered seven different industries. It never found a clear next move and began spinning off small sets of employees as profit-oriented startups.

In January 2012, Wise gathered a team at Willow Garage to build a bot that could roll around a room and move objects — what’s known as a mobile manipulation robot. They had instructions to incorporate a low-cost robotics arm developed by another group at the lab. They called it PlatformBot.

PlatformBot was imagined to adapt to all kinds of applications, but its design meant it could never scale. Rendering courtesy of Willow Garage.

Wise’s team worked insane hours to make it happen. King had been hired on a few years back, and their duo expanded to four as they grew close to mechanical engineer Eric Diehr and software engineer Michael Ferguson.

It was all for naught. The arm didn’t work well, and the team made a series of bad decisions in the r0b0t’s design.

They started talking about spinning off a company so they could start over. But just as their plans were forming, news broke that Willow Garage had six months until it shut down. Hassan, who had been funding the lab with his own money, was no longer able to sustain the staff. Wise, King, Diehr and Ferguson broke off in February 2013 and called themselves Unbounded Robotics, trusting that they could develop a concrete spinoff agreement once Willow Garage’s situation settled down.

At Unbounded, they developed and launched their own mobile manipulator within eight months.

“We fundamentally started everything over from a blank slate,” Wise says. “The stuff that we had learned at Willow, it was obvious that we had gone down a bad path. It just wasn’t going to work.”

This time it worked. The one-armed UBR-1 was slated to retail for $50,000 — one eighth the cost of Willow Garage’s $400,000 PR-2.

The team finally sat down with Willow Garage in December 2013 to write a spinoff agreement. The final document was disastrous for Unbounded. Although UBR-1 didn’t incorporate any of Willow Garage’s patents, Unbounded did have permission to use the IP. It wasn’t crystal clear that UBR-1 belonged to Wise and her team, and that made investors wary enough that Unbounded couldn’t raise its first round of funding. They decided to abandon the company.

“That was a really tragic time for all of us,” Wise says. “We were all very lost.”

Unbounded Robotics built the UBR-1, which never shipped. Photo courtesy of Unbounded Robotics.

Not long after Unbounded shut down, the team saw a vague job posting seeking “robotics gurus.” Steve Hogan, of technology incubator Tech-Rx, wanted to get in on the coming robotics boom. He hired Wise, King, Diehr and Ferguson. The opportunity felt perfect, like a free pass to jump back onto the road they had started down so many years prior.

They spent six weeks researching markets such as robotic arms, hospitality and elder care before settling on e-commerce as the target for their future robot. The bulk of their expertise now lay in mobile manipulators, and the space was still fairly empty. The path was clear to create a product that would give a small company the robotic power of an Amazon fulfillment center.

Fetch Robotics launched officially in February with funding from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Shasta Ventures. “(Wise’s) name came up several times when looking into the robotics industry,” Shasta Ventures managing director Rob Coneybeer says. “We think it’s one of the best robotics teams in the world.”

To finally capture their Series A funding, Fetch had to leave behind all of the Unbounded IP and, once again, start over. Which was not a bad thing. “It’s actually pretty liberating to be forced to think in a new direction,” Wise says. “I think sometimes as an engineer you cling to what you know and what you’re safe with doing. It totally changed how we approached the problem and made us more creative.”

In an empty back room at Fetch Robotics headquarters in San Jose, a Fetch robot moves each axis of its long arm in turn. It raises and lowers its spine, growing from the height of a child to that of an adult. It will run 24/7 until it dies so the team can spot and fix its weaknesses.

The Fetch’s tongue depressor-shaped torso, arm and head are bolted on top of a Freight, making it mobile. Fetch can roll into a warehouse and start picking items off of shelves and dropping them into a second Freight, this one carrying a bin and traveling at its side. A new Freight, each of which can carry up to 110 pounds, can swap itself in after a full one rolls away — no human input necessary. The upfront cost of one Fetch is the same as hiring a human employee for a year.

Fetch the robot and Melonee Wise. Photo courtesy of Fetch Robotics.

Both Freight and Fetch are designed to be as low maintenance as possible. After being trained on the layout of a warehouse, there is very little they need to be taught. The robots automatically dock when they need to be charged. They resist being shoved by humans, or hurting them.

Wise invites a Freight to follow her around the office’s dummy warehouse by tapping a button on her phone. It uses a beacon sent from her phone, but it also sees every step she takes through a set of sensors that line its front. When a shelf or person blocks its path, it waits and then makes an arc around the obstacle.

Wise fills the Freight bin to the brim with Pringles, soap and other knick-knacks that the Fetch employees had picked up at a local dollar store (the cashier asked if they were preparing for the end of the world). Then she taps her phone and the Freight turns and rolls out of the room. In a real warehouse it would ferry its bin to a shipping area.

Wise’s role as the picker could be replaced entirely by a Fetch, which uses sensors in its head to locate and grab items with its pincer-like hand. A warehouse’s database integrates with Fetch’s brain to let the robot know the area in which to find an item, but it is up to the robot to pick out an individual object.

I had visited the Unbounded team, and when I look at Fetch, I feel a sense of déjà vu. Its form is noticeably similar to the UBR-1 robot Wise developed at Unbounded. But that is inevitable, according to Wise. All mobile manipulators end up with a base, torso, arm and head. If UBR-1 and Fetch are siblings, so are their competitors.

But take a look inside, and you can see what is different. Where UBR-1 had 1,000 parts, Fetch has 500. The arm moves via an entirely different mechanism. Its vision is better. Wise believes the company has already developed significant new IP, and will continue to discover more.

“So much of what we have to do now is so different from what we thought we were doing then,” Wise says. “Obviously Fetch and Freight are an evolution of all of our experiences.”

Like UBR-1 and PlatformBot, Fetch is a platform. This first model is built specifically for picking in warehouses, but there is nothing stopping developers from giving it other tasks. Fetch could stock shelves or pack boxes. Eventually, it could work somewhere outside a warehouse.

Packaging Fetch and Freight together with warehouse-ready abilities is a shift in marketing strategy for Wise’s team, and a smart one. UBR-1 was also capable of stocking and picking, but that use was only one among the huge array of applications for which the robot was built. Concrete abilities, not possibilities, are what could place a Fetch Robotics fleet in every warehouse in America.

Fetch Robotics is working with unnamed partners to test the robots in real warehouses over the next few months. Companies have already pre-ordered units ahead of the commercial ship date later this year. Wise won’t set the pricing until after the pilot tests, but she says a robot working 8 hours a day would pay for itself in a year. Ordering multiple robots will drop the price even further.