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. It is the primary maintainer of the
Robot Operating System, and 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, ...
.
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,
NASA,
Amazon,
Bosch,
Nvidia and the
Toyota Research Institute.
History
The beginnings of Open Robotics can be traced to
Willow Garage, a
robotics research lab and incubator created by Scott Hassan, an early
Google engineer and billionaire technology entrepreneur. It was here that the first official
Robot Operating System (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
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, ...
.
OSRF's initial backers included
Willow Garage and
DARPA, which awarded OSRF its first contract to support open source simulation software for the
DARPA Robotics Challenge. In subsequent years, OSRF also provided support for
NASA'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, 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.
OSRF remains an independent non-profit.
In April 15th, 2024 th
OSRA(THE OPEN SOURCE Robotics Alliance) replaced the OSRC, the OSRC was sold to Intrinsic ''before'' the creation of th
OSRAinitiative, and both of those things are part of a single long-term plan by the OSRF to provide a stable future for ROS, Gazebo, Open-RMF, and the infrastructure that supports them.
References
{{reflist, 2
External links
Official websiteAshlee 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