We’re Go For Launch!
Brief Recent History From Your Friendly Neighborhood Navigator
In 2018, Intel’s Open Source team started an ambitious project to fundamentally redesign the ROS Navigation Stack for the upcoming launch of the first named ROS 2 distribution. I was one of the first in the community to see this as a monumental opportunity to influence the future of both the robotics product I was working on and the industry. Together with Matt Hansen, Mohammad Haghighipanah, Carlos Orduno, Carl Delsey, and Michael Jeronimo from Intel, we built the Beta and mostly-functional…ish version of Navigation2.
Not long after, I took up a position at Samsung Research as their go-to guy on all things ROS and Robotics. I helped them in building their advanced robotics capabilities globally while representing Samsung to the Open-Source and Robotics communities. After 6 months, Intel pivoted and I was left as the last author and thus now the project’s only leader and maintainer.
Over the last 5 years, I turned the project’s attention to community, quality, and capability — where we have made historic strides and made the re-imagined Nav2 project into what I firmly believe is the world’s finest navigation system. During this period, we’ve seen explosive growth with 100+ companies worldwide using it in logistics, mining, agriculture, aerospace, consumer products, advanced research, oil/gas, and much more. The growth of industry adoption and the aggregated capabilities created over the years is staggering even to me in retrospect. At this point, it truly is the standard navigation framework for the robotics industry.
In March 2023, I left my role as the Senior Technical Lead at Samsung Research due to restructuring in robotics efforts. This was not so dissimilar to what had happened to Intel’s team years prior and those parallels have resonated with me — this is the third time the future of ROS’ navigation system is in question due to a host organization losing long-term perspective or shutting down - putting 100+ companies and the broader industry at a serious risk. In order to put one of ROS’ prominent ecosystems on a stable foundation, a new solution needs to be created. We however thank Samsung Research and Intel for their massive contribution to the community.
Introducing Open Navigation LLC
Open Navigation LLC was started to launch a new chapter in the ROS community and open-source mobile robotics technology. Now is the time for something new to allow the mobile robotics ecosystem to stand on its own feet like MoveIt and ROS itself did long ago — but with a characteristic twist to make the key focuses of Nav2 also our bedrock: community, quality, and capability.
Open Navigation was formed to lead, develop, and support the Nav2 framework and its related capabilities for the mobile robotics community. We use a sponsorship-driven model to partner with companies leveraging or relying on Nav2 for their products to maintain and develop these systems for the long-term future. By taking a long-term view, we can ensure organizations that decide to use Nav2 yesterday, today, or tomorrow that we’ll be there to support them throughout their product journey. Partnering with companies that rely on the system for their own success creates a positive feedback loop of reinforcing continuous improvement in the same project we all share and creates a sustainable / stable source of funding to safeguard the long-term of the community-driven ecosystem — funded by you, our user community! That means that there are no private forks only for sponsors, no non-commercial licenses of sponsored development, and no limit to what we can accomplish together.
We have learned from the experiences of others in our community that pure-consulting does not fully align with the community or allow for the often times thankless but critically important work needed to build a community and secure production quality — which are the key tenets that have made Nav2 so successful. By deriving a significant proportion of our revenue from sponsorships, we can use that funding to continue community-building activities, maintaining the highest of quality standards, and perform strategic high-intensity, high-risk, high-reward development which has created many of our crown jewels and would be virtually impossible to continue otherwise.
If you want to learn more about sponsorship, please checkout the Sponsors Page. If you leverage Nav2, please consider a sponsorship to help ensure your own long-term success! We are still actively seeking sponsors to be sustainable and grow this effort further. Help us help you and support the capabilities that power your business!
We also offer consulting and contracting services because we understand that sometimes you need some help from the experts for your particular application and frankly we can’t possibly predict every needed feature or application our users have in mind try as we might. We, however, have an expressed responsibility to the community to never create things in such a way to specifically drive consulting or contracting revenue — nor accept work from those who’s interests are clearly misaligned with our community — thanks to the generous support of the community. This high degree of alignment truly makes us collaborative with and never in opposition to our end-users, whether or not they hire or sponsor us (though, *cough*, please do 😄).
Please make sure to thank our sponsors for all they do for the global robotics community! Want to become one?
We’re Go For Launch! Announcing our Sponsors
We’ve been hard at work in discussions with the key stakeholders in the ROS community and in the Nav2 user-base. First off, we are deeply touched by the number of folks that reached out to us to get more involved. In all, 30+ companies we didn’t know used Nav2 got in contact, which has expanded our knowledge base of companies using Nav2 from 50+ to 100+, spanning all 6 inhabited continents (yeah, I’m looking at you Antarctica). While this is our first announcement of sponsors, we’re sure it won’t be the last!
We’re excited to announce to you all our Founding Sponsors which are enabling the continued success of Nav2 and the entire ROS mobile robotics ecosystem. They are true leaders in their individual fields and without them, none of this would be possible. They’ve been great friends to Open Source for many years and we look forward to working with them even more closely. Please give them each a round of applause!
Dexory
Dexory is a Platinum Sponsor which develops robotics and AI logistics solutions to drive better business decisions. Via their DexoryView platform, data regarding inventory and state is autonomously collected to build a real-time digital twin — unlocking key insights in warehouse operations. Dexory accomplishes this using an impressive robot loaded with the latest sensors which can cover up to 15m tall to capture rack state and update their digital twin in real-time.
As impressive as their robot is, the data insights collected is the real value and enable customers to know where stock is, increase picking efficiency, and identify gaps for replenishment to drive intelligent business decisions.
The team at Dexory have been long-time partners of Nav2 and the ROS ecosystem and we’re grateful for their continued support! They’re using many of the most modern capabilities of Nav2, including the MPPI Controller, Smac Planner, Behavior Trees, and multiple contextual algorithms to power their business. All of these features were only made possible by the type of support provided by our sponsorships.
https://www.dexory.com/
Polymath Robotics
Polymath Robotics is a Silver Sponsor creating safety-critical navigation systems for industrial vehicles that are radically simple to enable and deploy. They convert some of the largest heavy equipment found in mining, forestry, earth moving, agriculture, shipping yards, and more into fully autonomous robots. Their products rapidly accelerate equipment to a useful & fully autonomous status while retaining the highest levels of safety.
Their product solves an immediate and wide-scale need in the world for the simple and rapid deployment of autonomy by non-experts. There is a critical shortage of robotics and autonomous engineers globally and Polymath’s products act as a force-multiplier for some of the most difficult and dangerous environments imaginable.
Polymath’s team is world-class, consisting of many folks we at Open Navigation knew of and respected well before the company was formed. They rely on the technology components of Nav2 as the foundation of their refined products — in addition to many specialized capabilities unique to their customer’s needs exploiting Nav2’s designed extensibility. We are grateful for their multi-faceted partnership and look forward to working together to contribute some of their capabilities back into Nav2 for the entire community to leverage.
https://www.polymathrobotics.com/
Stereolabs
Stereolabs is a Silver Sponsor producing high-quality stereo cameras with a complete vision pipeline from neural depth to SLAM, 3D object tracking, AI and more. They produce the famous ZED series of sensors powered by Nvidia’s Jetson modules with ranges from 0.1 - 20m perfect for robotics applications indoor or out. Armed with global shutter, externally triggerable cameras with hardware synchronized IMUs and industrial-rated enclosures, these are some of the most capable sensors on the market.
Stereolabs is a long-time industry leader in depth camera sensor technology and provides a powerful SDK to perform a variety of common robotics perception tasks leveraging their deep expertise in machine vision tightly coupled with their sensors. Excitingly, they’ve recently released a new product, ZED X, designed specifically for mobile robotics applications!
We’re excited to see how Nav2 users can leverage the ZED sensors, perception SDK, and available Jetson compute to accelerate their businesses with an integrated approach. We’re also happy to have a sensing partner with such deep expertise to help bring these next-generation technologies to the ROS 2 and Nav2 communities!
https://www.stereolabs.com/
Confidential
While rather unusual, we have a sponsor that is not to be named. Either way, they’re helping us keep the lights on and has asked for nothing but ‘keep going forward’ so we solute them all the same!
Interested in becoming a sponsor?
