Open Navigation LLC was formed in 2023 to lead, develop, and support the Nav2 navigation framework. Nav2 is utilized by 100+ companies worldwide from agriculture and mining to warehousing automation and advanced research. It has received significant attention due to its modern and expanding sets of capabilities, high quality and configurability, and professional maintenance and support. Additionally, the Nav2 community drives ROS 2 adoption and are often the first to find bugs critical to ROS users more broadly - creating a more stable and effective ROS for all.

We seek sponsorship from organizations relying upon ROS 2 and/or Nav2 for their products and services to enable long-term stability of the critical capability within your systems. Financing Nav2 and its related packages provides a sustainable avenue to continue to reliably merge changes on a rapid timeline, repose software defects, develop additional capabilities, and perform the thankless maintenance tasks behind the scenes. In exchange, sponsors will also receive prioritized responses and expanded private access to Open Navigation LLC staff and expertise, in addition to other benefits including publicity and roadmap influence. If you leverage ROS 2 or Nav2, sponsoring Open Navigation is in your own best interest!

A sponsorship-first model was selected after learning from the experiences from other organizations in our community. An important benefit of sponsorship-based funding is a higher degree of alignment between sponsors and the framework. This leads to better outcomes including:

• Alignment to make software easy to use → Rather than obfuscating software to drive consulting business

• Alignment to make software permissible → Rather than restrictive licensing to drive dual licensing agreements

• Alignment to make software free → Rather than providing somewhat optional paid add-ons

General Benefits

Sponsoring Nav2 via Open Navigation LLC enables world-class experts to continue to provide a high degree of support to all end-users globally. It also allows for the continued development of key technologies to solve tangible problems facing the commercialization of robotics in a number of domains.

Please thank our sponsors for enabling these amazing benefits to the ROS 2 and Nav2 communities:

• Rapid responses to incoming tickets, pull requests, or communications

• Development of capabilities for new applications, behaviors, and tasks

• Resolution of identified bugs or defects

• Updates technologies for the latest methods and domain changes

• Engagement in knowledge sharing and technical communication

• Enforcement of quality, security, and release, and versioning standards

• Fostering collaborations between students, researchers, and companies