Platform hub

ROS 2 and Open Robotics

The open middleware, simulator and planning stack that most robot makers ship drivers for. Free, Apache-2.0 at the core, with LTS releases on a fixed five-year cycle.

Organisation	Open Source Robotics Foundation, Inc. (California non-profit, trading as Open Robotics); projects governed through the Open Source Robotics Alliance
Website	www.openrobotics.org/
Licensing	Core ROS 2 packages and Gazebo under Apache-2.0; MoveIt 2 under BSD-3-Clause; Nav2 mixes Apache-2.0, BSD-3-Clause and LGPL-2.1-or-later by package
Pricing	Free to download and use; no paid tier from Open Robotics at the time of writing
Updated	14 Nov 2026

Products and offerings #

Name	Kind	Positioning
ROS 2 Current LTS releases are Jazzy Jalisco (to May 2029) and Lyrical Luth (to May 2031)	framework	Middleware, build tools and client libraries (rclcpp, rclpy) over DDS or Zenoh
Gazebo Jetty (LTS, to May 2031) pairs with Lyrical, Harmonic (LTS, to May 2029) with Jazzy	simulator	Rigid-body simulator with sensor models and a ROS 2 bridge
Nav2	library	Navigation stack for mobile robots: localisation, costmaps, planners, controllers, behaviour trees
MoveIt 2	library	Motion planning, kinematics and collision checking for arms, with OMPL as the default planner
ros2_control	framework	Hardware abstraction and controller manager that most arm drivers plug into
Open-RMF	framework	Fleet and facility integration for mixed robot fleets

Who they are

This hub is for anyone choosing a software base for a robot, and for anyone integrating hardware from the makers listed elsewhere on the Robotics Field Guide. The Open Source Robotics Foundation was created in 2012 as a non-profit to steward ROS, according to its 2022 announcement. In December 2022 Intrinsic bought the assets of the foundation’s for-profit subsidiaries, while ROS, Gazebo and Open-RMF stayed with the non-profit. In March 2024 the foundation set up the Open Source Robotics Alliance (OSRA), a charitable programme of the foundation that runs technical governance for those three projects.

ROS 2 sits underneath almost everything else on this site. It is not an operating system. It is a set of libraries, a build system (colcon and ament), a message format and a publish-subscribe layer, and the ROS and middleware topic explains the model in depth.

Tooling and APIs

You install a distribution, not a version. ROS 2 Jazzy Jalisco (LTS, May 2024) is supported until May 2029 and targets Ubuntu 24.04 on amd64 and arm64, plus Windows 10, as Tier 1 platforms in REP 2000. ROS 2 Lyrical Luth (LTS, released 22 May 2026) is supported until May 2031. Its Tier 1 platforms are Ubuntu 26.04 (amd64 and arm64) and Windows 11, with RHEL 10 at Tier 2. Ubuntu 24.04, Debian 13 and macOS are Tier 3 for Lyrical, which means you build from source. Lyrical requires C++20 and Python 3.12 to 3.14, according to its supported-platforms page. The non-LTS Kilted Kaiju (May 2025) reaches end of life at the end of 2026, and Humble Hawksbill (LTS, May 2022) in May 2027.

The default middleware in Lyrical is eProsima Fast DDS (rmw_fastrtps_cpp). Cyclone DDS, RTI Connext and Zenoh (rmw_zenoh_cpp) are also Tier 1. You switch with the RMW_IMPLEMENTATION environment variable, and every node in a system must use a compatible choice. The DDS and QoS glossary entries cover the vocabulary.

On top of the core you add the pieces you need. Gazebo Jetty pairs with Lyrical and Gazebo Harmonic with Jazzy, according to the Gazebo release table. Nav2 handles mobile navigation, MoveIt 2 handles arm planning, and ros2_control is the interface that vendor drivers implement. A driver that exposes a ros2_control hardware interface works with the standard joint trajectory controller and with MoveIt 2 without glue code. The ROS 2 CLI cheat sheet lists the commands, and the hello ROS 2 lesson starts from zero.

Everything is free. Commercial support comes from integrators and from the companies that maintain individual packages, not from Open Robotics.

Pain points: binaries are built per distribution per Ubuntu release, so an OS upgrade forces a ROS upgrade. DDS discovery relies on multicast, which managed networks and Wi-Fi often block. Mixing a source-built workspace with apt packages from a different sync date is a common cause of ABI errors.

Migration notes

Units and frames. ROS uses SI units and right-handed frames with x forward, y left, z up, per REP 103. Mobile robots use map, odom and base_link per REP 105. Drone stacks use NED and FRD instead (see the drones hub), and camera optical frames put z forward.
Quaternions. geometry_msgs/Quaternion stores (x, y, z, w). MuJoCo, the Spot SDK and spatialmath put w first. Reorder at the boundary, and see the rotation representations cheat sheet.
Robot descriptions. ROS uses URDF, usually generated from xacro. Gazebo prefers SDF and converts URDF on load. MuJoCo uses MJCF and Isaac Sim uses USD. The URDF and MJCF cheat sheet covers the differences.
Jazzy to Lyrical. Expect to move to Ubuntu 26.04 and C++20. Check that each vendor driver you depend on has a Lyrical branch before you switch.

Watch for

Support windows are fixed. An LTS distribution gets five years. Kilted, a non-LTS release, runs from May 2025 to late 2026. Plan the Humble migration now if you still run it, because it ends in May 2027.
Licences vary by package. Most of the stack is Apache-2.0 or BSD, but some Nav2 packages are LGPL-2.1-or-later, according to the Nav2 licence file. Check each package.xml before you ship a closed product.
Vendor drivers lag. A new distribution is usable only when your arm, camera and lidar drivers have caught up, and some makers support one distribution at a time.
Safety lives elsewhere. Treat ROS 2 as non-safety software. Safety functions belong in the robot controller or a certified safety PLC, as the safety and standards topic explains.