March 22nd, 2012 is the day it all began. That's the day we officially incorporated the Open Source Robotics Foundation, the origin of what we now call Open Robotics. The prospect of starting a company is both scary and exciting; but starting an open-source company in a niche as specialized as robotics, now that is terrifying and exhilarating, if not a little unorthodox. All we had was a dream, some open-source code, and some very smart friends, a whole lot of them. We also had the wind at our backs.

ROS, which stands for Robot Operating System, is a set of software libraries and tools that help you build robot application; Gazebo is a 3D robotics simulator. ROS and Gazebo are both open source and are widely used in the robotics community. Gerkey explains ROS and Gazebo and how they are used in robotics, as well as some of the design decisions of the second version of ROS, ROS2. Brian Gerkey is the CEO of Open Robotics, which seeks to develop and drive the adoption of open source software in robotics. Before Open Robotics, Brian was the Director of Open Source Development at Willow Garage, a computer scientist in the SRI Artificial Intelligence Center, a post-doctoral scholar in Sebastian Thrun's group in the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab.

Today, the Open Source Robotics Foundation announced a whole bunch of stuff, including a big pile of money from Toyota Research, what is probably an even bigger pile of money from Toyota Research, and the formation of the for-profit Open Source Robotics Corporation. That last thing might sound a little worrisome, since corporation-ness and open source-itude are often at odds, but we checked in with OSRF CEO Brian Gerkey, who explained how it's all going to work. The most straightforward bit of news is that the Toyota Research Institute (TRI) is making a charitable donation of US 1 million to the Open Source Robotics Foundation to "advance the development and adoption of open source robotics software." In other words, TRI thinks that OSRF has been doing pretty good work with ROS and Gazebo over the last couple years, and they're supporting that vision financially. Since it's a donation, OSRF can use that money however it wants, meaning that it's going to benefit the development of ROS and Gazebo for everyone.