Intel - Welcome Back as Nav2 Gold Sponsor!

Intel Returns - Nav2’s Newest Gold Sponsor!

We are thrilled to announce that Intel is Nav2’s newest Gold-level Sponsor! Intel joins NVIDIA, Polymath Robotics, and AMD in our Gold tier to help support the continued development, maintenance, and long-term sustainability of Nav2 and the broader ROS 2 mobile robotics ecosystem. Intel’s processors are inside of a huge number of the robots running Nav2 today - from research platforms to commercial fleets of AMRs - so it is a natural fit to have them supporting the software running on top of them.

But for those that have been around Nav2 for a while, this isn’t really a new relationship. It’s a homecoming!

Where It All Started

Nav2 began its life at Intel. In June 2018, Intel’s Open Source Robotics team made the very first commits to the navigation2 repository with the goal of bringing a production-quality navigation system to the then brand-new ROS 2. Steve Macenski, CEO of Open Navigation, joined in as a contributor that Summer and that is where Macenski’s own journey with Nav2 began, helping do the initial development, porting, and heavy lifting on design for practical robotics needs.

That original team laid many of the foundations that Nav2 is still built upon today: behavior tree based navigation, lifecycle-managed servers, the recovery behaviors (now behaviors), the simple action server, dynamically loaded BT nodes, and the system testing that keeps us honest. A very big thank you to the Intel team that made it all happen:

• Matt Hansen
• Carl Delsey
• Michael Jeronimo
• Mohammad Haghighipanah
• Carlos Orduno

Without their work and early vision, there would be no Nav2 as we know it today, plain and simple. Over the years, the project transitioned to Open Navigation where it has grown into the navigation system used by over 300 companies worldwide in production. It’s very exciting to have Intel back involved with the project they helped create!

Nav2 & You

Intel’s support for Nav2 enables us to continue improving the performance and capabilities of Nav2 on the compute that robots actually ship with. Most mobile robots are still CPU-bound, so making sure Nav2 runs efficiently on Intel’s processors benefits a very large portion of the robotics community. As always, the improvements made through this partnership will be open-source so everyone can benefit, regardless of which hardware you use.

We look forward to working closely with Intel again and have some fun things in the works to share at a later date ;-)

In the meantime, if you’re building robots on Intel hardware, check out Intel’s Robotics AI Suite: it has validated components, reference applications, and an Autonomous Mobile Robot blueprint built on top of ROS 2, with optimizations for Intel CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs. Learn more about Intel Robotics →