Open Robotics
Founders: Brian Gerkey, John Hsu, Morgan Quigley, Nate Koenig, Steffi Paepcke
Founded: 2012
HQ: Mountain View, CA
Open Robotics, along with the broader ROS community, have been working for over a decade to build free and open source tools and applications to advance the field of robotics. Working with our global community, we offer two open platforms: ROS and Gazebo. Program your robots with ROS and simulate them with Gazebo. These tools are widely deployed in production environments around the world. They are also relied upon by hundreds of thousands of robotics researchers, educators, students, and hobbyists. ROS drives many of the most advanced robotics applications in the world; and the development of ROS is continually advanced with the professional support of Open Robotics.
Open Robotics annual Community Metrics Report gives an overview of the size of the ROS community supported by Open Robotics. Red Hat just released their full five part documentary about the history of ROS. The documentary is called, “How to Start a Robot Revolution” and is part of an on-going documentary series called Open Source Stories, with a full account of the history of ROS at Willow Garage. If you are unfamiliar with the history of ROS this is a great chance to learn about how we got here and the people behind ROS. You can also see Brian Gerkey’s talk. @gerkey’s talk at RedHat Summit 2020