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,

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

. 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 compu ...

, the

Gazebo simulator Gazebo is an open-source 3D robotics simulator. It integrated the ODE physics engine, OpenGL rendering, and support code for sensor simulation and actuator control. Gazebo can use multiple high-performance physics engines, such as ODE, Bullet, ...

, and the

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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 Adv ...

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research. NASA was established in 1958, succeeding t ...

Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek mythology * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon (company), an American multinational technology c ...

, Bosch,

Nvidia Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

and the

Toyota is a Japanese multinational automotive manufacturer headquartered in Toyota City, Aichi, Japan. It was founded by Kiichiro Toyoda and incorporated on . Toyota is one of the largest automobile manufacturers in the world, producing about 10 ...

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 (Robot ...

, a

robotics Robotics is an 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 humans. Robotics integrat ...

research lab and incubator created by Scott Hassan, an early

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

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

. 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 syll ...

. 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