Open Robotics is a

nonprofit corporation A nonprofit corporation is any legal entity which has been incorporated under the law of its jurisdiction for purposes other than making profits for its owners or shareholders. Depending on the laws of the jurisdiction, a nonprofit corporation may ...

headquartered in Mountain View,

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. It is the primary maintainer of the

Robot Operating System Robot Operating System (ROS or ros) is an open-source robotics middleware suite. Although ROS is not an operating system (OS) but a set of software frameworks for robot software development, it provides services designed for a heterogeneous comp ...

, the Gazebo simulator, and the Ignition libraries that are set to supersede Gazebo by 2025. Its stated mission is to support "the development, distribution and adoption of open source software for use in robotics research, education, and product development". Open Robotics funds its operations through the contributions of various public and private organizations, some of whom also engage its services for the development of various robotics applications, robotics R&D and consulting. Notable sources of past and current funding include

DARPA The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Ad ...

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and the

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Research Institute.

History

The beginnings of Open Robotics can be traced to

Willow Garage Willow Garage was a robotics research lab and technology incubator devoted to developing hardware and open source software for personal robotics applications. The company was most likely best known for its open source software suite ROS (Rob ...

, a

robotics Robotics is an interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary branch of computer science and engineering. Robotics involves design, construction, operation, and use of robots. The goal of robotics is to design machines that can help and assist human ...

research lab and incubator created by Scott Hassan, an early

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engineer and billionaire technology entrepreneur. It was here that the first official

(ROS) distribution was released in May 2010, and quickly gained widespread adoption. Willow Garage was gradually dissolved in the ensuing years into several spin-offs, including the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF), which was created in May 2012 to continue to shepherd the development of ROS and the Gazebo simulator. OSRF's initial backers included

and

, which awarded OSRF its first contract to support open source simulation software for the

DARPA Robotics Challenge The DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) was a prize competition funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Held from 2012 to 2015, it aimed to develop semi-autonomous ground robots that could do "complex tasks in dangerous, degraded, ...

. In subsequent years, OSRF also provided support for

's Space Robotics challenge and the DARPA Subterranean Challenge. In September 2016, a taxable subsidiary named the Open Source Robotics Corporation (OSRC) was created to foster greater collaboration with industry. Together with OSRF, these two organizations came to be officially known as Open Robotics in May 2017. In 2018, Open Robotics opened its first overseas office in

Singapore Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, borde ...

, and announced its collaboration with the Singapore Government to work on robotics applications for the healthcare sector. In December 2022, OSRC and OSRC-SG (the Singapore entity) were acquired by Intrinsic, a subsidiary of

Alphabet An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a s ...

. OSRF remains an independent non-profit.

References

{{reflist, 2

External links

Official website

Ashlee Vance, Willow Garage's Last Days, Bloomberg Business, February 20, 2014.
Robotics companies of the United States Companies based in Mountain View, California Technology companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area Non-profit corporations