Yesterday, Clearpath Robotics of Kitchener, Ont., Canada (and Clearpath’s mobile-logistics robotic division OTTO Motors), introduced that it was being acquired by Milwaukee-based Rockwell Automation for an undisclosed quantity.
The press launch (which comes from Rockwell, not Clearpath) is concentrated solely on robotics for industrial functions. That’s, on OTTO Motors’ Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) within the context of manufacturing logistics. When you check out what Rockwell does, this is sensible, as a result of as an automation company, they’re not sometimes doing what most of us would consider as “robotics” within the sense that the mechanical techniques that they automate don’t do the form of dynamic decision-making that (in my view) distinguishes robots from machines. So, the OTTO Motors AMRs (and the folks at OTTO who get them to autonomously behave themselves) present an essential and forward-looking addition to what Rockwell is ready to provide in an industrial context.
That’s all advantageous and dandy so far as OTTO Motors goes. What worries me, although, is that there’s zero point out of Clearpath’s well-known and much loved family of yellow-and-black research robots. This contains the Husky UGV, arguably the usual platform for cell robotics analysis and growth, in addition to the marginally much less yellow however simply as impactful Turtlebot 4, announced barely a year ago in partnership with iRobot and Open Robotics.
With iRobot, Open Robotics, and now Clearpath all getting partially or wholly subsumed (or consumed?) by different corporations which have their very own priorities, it’s onerous to not be involved about what’s going to occur to those {hardware} and software program platforms (together with Turtlebot and Robotic Working System) which have offered the foundation for so much robotics research and education. Clearpath particularly has been a pillar of the ROS group since there’s been a ROS group, and it’s unclear how issues are going to vary going ahead.
We’ve reached out to Clearpath to hopefully get just a little little bit of readability on all these items, and we’ll have an replace as quickly as we will.
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