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Clearpath Robotics’ Husky UGV is an all-terrain mobile robot development platform. | Source: Clearpath Robotics

Editor’s Note: Brian Gerkey, co-founder and CEO of Open Robotics, is keynoting our Robotics Summit & Expo, which takes place May 10-11 in Boston. His talk, called “Robotics Needs a Babelfish: The Skinny on Robot Interoperability,” will discuss how companies are addressing interoperability, and what options are available to vendors, end users, and integrators. Attendees will learn about the history of Open-RMF (Robotics Middleware Framework), best practices for multiple vendor robot interoperability, and future interoperability trends.

Clearpath Robotics announced that ROS 2 is now available on its Husky unmanned ground vehicle (UGV). The UGV is a medium-sized robotic development platform popular among robotics researchers. 

Husky is an all-terrain mobile robot that can be equipped with stereo cameras, LiDAR, GPS, IMUs and manipulators. The robot weighs in at 110 lbs, and has a payload capacity of 165 lbs. Its max speed is 2.2 MPH, and it can typically run for 3 hours on a single charge. According to Clearpath Robotics, Husky was the first field robotics platform to support ROS from its factory settings.

Husky was also one of the first robots outside of Willow Garage, a robotics research lab that developed ROS until Open Robotics was founded in 2012, to offer official ROS support. ROS 2 improves upon ROS 1, and makes it able to be used in more unique use cases, such as multi-robot teams, small embedded systems and non-ideal networks.

Clearpath and Open Robotics have a history of collaborating on mobile robot platforms. The two companies collaborated on the TurtleBot 4, the next generation of the popular open-source mobile robotics platform. TurtleBot 4 aims to build on the success of previous versions by providing a low-cost, fully extensible, ROS-enabled reference platform for robotics researchers, developers, and educators.

Open Robotics recently celebrated its 10 year anniversary. On March 22nd, 2012 it officially incorporated the Open Source Robotics Foundation.