InOrbit joins the Open Source Robotics Alliance

InOrbit Inc. this month joined the Open Source Robotics Alliance, or OSRA. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company said it is a milestone in its commitment to fostering collaboration and innovation within the robotics community.

“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,” stated Vanessa Yamzon Orsi, CEO of the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF). She referred to the Robot Operating System. 

The OSRF last month launched the OSRA as an alliance of companies aimed at strengthening the governance of open-source robotics software projects. The OSRA said it has a mixed-membership, meritocratic model inspired by organizations such as the Linux Foundation. 

The 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.

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OSRA supports shared goal of industry collaboration

By joining the OSRA, InOrbit said it is reaffirming its commitment to advancing open-source projects and promoting collaborative innovation in the robotics industry.

“The open-source community has enabled great advancements in the development and deployment of robotics solutions in the past 15 years,” said Julian Cerruti, co-founder and chief technology officer of InOrbit. “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.”

“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 initiative,” he added about the OSRA.

InOrbit said its cloud platform enables efficient robot operations (RobOps) and provides observability through secure, real-time analytics and data collection, robot performance monitoring, incident response, and root-cause analysis.

Open-source is key to interoperability, says InOrbit

InOrbit said it has been working with open initiatives since its inception, supporting ROS and ROS 2, among others. The company said this supports its approach to interoperability.

As the landscape changes for mobile robot makers and users, interoperability is becoming a concern, noted InOrbit. The company said that as robot fleets grow, and organizations add more automation to work alongside or with existing systems, they need a new level of orchestration. 

InOrbit said 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, it claimed.

The company added that it is a driving factor behind its 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 Fleet Adaptor. The adaptor is available on GitHub and was created with Ekumen Labs, another OSRA member.

As a silver members of the OSRA, InOrbit said it expects to contribute to shaping the future of robotics and to exploring opportunities for advancing RobOps with the alliance.

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