Open source InOrbit RMF Fleet Adapter now available

Deploying robots is getting easier everyday, aided in particular by tools like InOrbit, but anyone who works in the field knows there are still major points of friction. As we’ve talked about what works in the lab often doesn’t in production. The real world is full of unexpected chaos, from other robots, humans, existing infrastructure, or sometimes just a door that Pulls instead of Pushes. While we’re working to tackle robot orchestration at scale through our RobOps toolset, others are tackling some of the same challenges in parallel or from interesting alternate angles.

At InOrbit we envision a world that sees humans, robots and AI working together to drive radical productivity improvements and enable people to reach new heights. We’re not in this alone though. Ecosystem partners like those at the Ekumen share our vision. And industry leaders like Open Robotics have worked to bring widely used tools like Gazebo, and frameworks like ROS to the market for free. Efforts like these help the entire robotics industry grow. Another software system from the Open team that we’re very excited about is the Open Robotics Middleware Framework (Open-RMF).

Today we’re announcing the availability of the open source InOrbit RMF Fleet Adapter. Created in collaboration with Ekumen, this enables RMF’s traffic deconfliction, task execution and other capabilities to drive robots when connected through the InOrbit platform. Open-RMF is a free, open source, modular software system that enables sharing and interoperability between multiple fleets of robots and physical infrastructure, like doors, elevators and building management systems.

A repository can be found on GitHub now, along with an examples repository that includes a fully-working demo that can connect to any preconfigured InOrbit account, as well as a template to make it easier for adopters to configure a new Fleet Adapter instance with their own InOrbit accounts. Paired with InOrbit’s Free Edition, exploring the new Fleet Adapter is easy.

Find the InOrbit RMF Fleet Adapter alongside a complete list of additional ‘awesome adapters’ right here.

InOrbit CTO Julian Cerruti shared some insight on the significance of this project. “We’ve had the intention to add support for Open-RMF for a long time. I’m very happy that we finally found the opportunity to finish it and make it available to the community. As our relationship with OSRF and Open Robotics (now Intrinsic) dates back to the good old Willow Garage days, we understand the quality and impact of the technology they create and make available to the whole community. We also share their motivation to enable roboticists and accelerate the development of robotics solutions. That’s why the opportunity to contribute on this initiative was so clear and the execution so rewarding.”

InOrbit supports interoperability as a key component to realizing more complex robot tasks and safely managing interactions with human collaborators and other robots in a given space. Beyond traditional fleet management, orchestration to manage multi-task, multi-robot, and multi-vendor fleets requires interoperability. This project is a part of our ongoing efforts to continue improving our platform integrations with the software and products already being used in real production environments.

Check out our Developer Docs, or reach out if you’d like more information on InOrbit RMF Fleet Adapter integration.