Today, we are excited to share that ros-controls has officially joined the OSRA family as a governed project! The Open Source Robotics Alliance (OSRA) was created a little less than a year ago with the goal of becoming an umbrella organization for our open source robotics community, and we are excited to bring ros-controls into the organization as our first outside, community-led open source project. ros-controls is a collection of packages for real time robot control using ROS 2. ros-controls is used by a number of well-known robotics organizations such as PickNik Robotics, ROS Industrial, and PAL Robotics and by our estimates ros-controls and its related packages were downloaded close to ten millions times in 2024. For over a decade, ros-controls has played a crucial role in the ROS ecosystem, providing a robust framework for real-time robot control. With OSRA’s support, we are excited to expand our capabilities, strengthen our community, and ensure the future of open-source robotics control software.
What does this mean for ros-controls?
With OSRA’s backing, ros-controls will benefit from:
Long-term sustainability – Ensuring continued development and maintenance.- Improved governance – A structured, community-driven approach to decision-making.
- Stronger collaboration – Integration with key robotics projects like ROS, Gazebo, and Open-RMF.
- Industry-backed support – Greater involvement from OSRA members, including leading robotics companies.
What does this mean for ros-controls contributors and users?
ros-controls users and contributors probably won’t notice changes to the current development process, but over the next few weeks the following will happen in the background to align the ros-controls project with OSRA’s governance norms:
- The Control WG community group meetings will become official ros-controls Project Management Committee (PMC) meetings.
- The current maintainers, @bmagyar, @christophfroehlich , @destogl and @saikishor will become members of the ros-controls PMC.
- The current maintainer of Gazebo repositories related to ros2_control, @ahcorde , will become a commiter for the ros-controls project.
- @bmagyar will become the project leader and representative to the OSRA Technical Governance Committee (TGC).
- @destogl will become the ros-controls co-leader and replacement for @bmagyar at TGC meetings.
- The public project charter will be posted shortly - this document will outline clear procedures to becoming a ros-controls commiter and a member of the ros-controls PMC.
What’s Next?
We invite developers, researchers, and robotics companies to contribute and be part of this journey. If you’d like to get involved, check out our project at control.ros.org or join our discussions on ROS Discourse and Github.
A huge thank you to our contributors, maintainers, and users who have helped make the ros-controls a success. Your dedication has brought us to this incredible milestone, and we’re looking forward to the next chapter together!