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We're excited to announce that InOrbit has joined the Open Source Robotics Alliance (OSRA), a milestone in our commitment to fostering collaboration and innovation within the robotics community.
The OSRA, initiated by the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF), is a recently launched alliance of companies aimed at strengthening the governance of open-source robotics software projects. With a mixed-membership and meritocratic model inspired by organizations like the Linux Foundation, OSRA invites community stakeholders to participate in the oversight, direction, development, and support of key open-source projects, including ROS, Gazebo, Open-RMF, and their infrastructure.
By joining OSRA, InOrbit reaffirms its commitment to advancing open-source projects and promoting collaborative innovation in the robotics industry. Julian Cerruti, CTO and Co-founder at InOrbit emphasized the significance of joining the Alliance: "The open source community has enabled great advancements in the development and deployment of robotics solutions in the past 15 years. As the robotics industry grows, it's increasingly important to create the space and organize ourselves properly to support a consensus-based advancement of these technologies that multiple companies depend on." He added, "At InOrbit we greatly appreciate the work that OSRF has done over the years to support and promote this effort and are happy to lend our support by sponsoring and participating in this (OSRA) initiative."’
InOrbit has been working with open initiatives since its inception, supporting ROS and ROS2 robots, among many others. This speaks directly to InOrbit's approach to interoperability. Interoperability is central to InOrbit as it marks the changing landscape for those making and deploying robots. As fleets of robots grow, and additional automation is introduced to work in parallel, or in partnership with existing systems a new level of orchestration is required. At InOrbit we see Interoperability as key to realizing more complex tasks and safely managing interactions with human collaborators and other robots in a given space. This need goes beyond traditional fleet management and is a driving factor behind our ongoing support for emerging interoperability standards and tools like the Open Robotics Middleware Framework (Open-RMF). Last year InOrbit announced the availability of the open-source InOrbit RMF Flet Adaptor, available on GitHub, created in collaboration with experts at fellow OSRA member Ekumen.
Vanessa Yamzon Orsi, CEO of the Open Source Robotics Foundation, highlighted the importance of collaboration with partners like InOrbit: "Having members like InOrbit is crucial to us because it's an indicator of support from long-standing community members for our vision for the future of the ROS ecosystem."
As silver members with the OSRA, the team at InOrbit is excited to contribute, continuing our journey in shaping the future of robotics through open collaboration and shared innovation. Stay tuned for more updates as InOrbit and the OSRA explore new opportunities for advancing RobOps together. Learn more about InOrbit's commitment to interoperability here.