Software & Middleware

Open-Source Robotics

Open-source robotics is the development and distribution of robot software, and increasingly hardware designs, under open licenses, exemplified by ROS, Gazebo, MoveIt, PyBullet, and MuJoCo on the software side and platforms like ALOHA and LeRobot's low-cost arms on the hardware side. Open ecosystems standardize interfaces and let research results transfer between labs and into products.

Why it matters for physical AI

Shared stacks and cheap reproducible hardware compound progress across the field, and most robot learning research today builds directly on open simulators, datasets, and policy codebases.