Don Bies, one of the very few who can claim to be R2 operator has been with Lucasfilm for many years. Both Don Bies and Nelson Hall played Boba Fett in the new shots in "Return of the Jedi" (special edition). His first job at Industrial Light and Magic was in 1987 as a puppeteer on The Witches of Eastwick, and later that year joined Lucasfilm Ltd. as their official R2-D2 operator for a series of Japanese commercials. Wikipedia
The definitive Wikipedia entry for Don Bies. Wikipedia is the biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Bies_%28filmmaker%29