Sheffield-based OLO Robotics has completed its commercial launch and announced manufacturing and distribution partnerships with three robotics hardware companies: China's DEEP Robotics, Germany's inMotion Robotic and Poland's Fiction Lab, the company announced on May 20. The partnerships package OLO's browser-based ROS2 development platform alongside quadruped and mobile robots, positioning the combined stack for software teams that do not employ specialist roboticists.
A ROS2 development environment that runs in the browser
OLO Robotics provides an accessibility layer on top of ROS2, the open-source operating system that has become the industry default for robot software. The platform brings the full ROS2 development environment into the browser, including cloud simulation, AI-assisted coding, visualisation and sim-to-real deployment. It supports both JavaScript and Python, requires no local installation, and connects directly to existing ROS2 robots and drivers.
“The industry has spent a decade talking about a skills shortage as if the only answer is to train more roboticists,” said co-founder and CEO Nick Thompson. “What we see is a different picture: the expertise is already inside warehouses, factories and labs, but the infrastructure was never built for those teams.” The company's stated goal is to expand the addressable developer base for robotics from specialists to mainstream software engineers.
Three partner robots, three deployment contexts
The Fiction Lab partnership covers the LEO Rover, a modular research-and-education platform used by universities and engineering teams. Customers can now order LEO Rovers bundled with OLO and start programming against a simulated robot in OLO's cloud environment before hardware ships, using the same browser-based tools they will later use on the physical machine. “Fiction Lab and OLO share a vision that robotics should be accessible to anyone with something worth building,” said Fiction Lab CEO Piotr Szlachcic.
DEEP Robotics's quadrupeds and inMotion Robotic's mobile platforms have also been integrated with OLO so they operate on the platform from first use, removing the need for separate integration projects. “Our hardware is capable of operating in some of the most demanding environments in the world,” said Yatao Zhang, director of Europe and Africa at DEEP Robotics. “Because OLO is built on ROS2, our robots work with the platform from day one, without additional integration work.”
Why ROS2 access is the bottleneck
Manufacturers have long faced a tension between offering open ROS2 compatibility and packaging proprietary SDKs that lock developers into a single robot family. For the partners on OLO, ROS2-native access means the underlying hardware becomes immediately usable for the software teams and integrators that already serve other parts of the enterprise stack.
“At inMotion Robotic we work with customers who want to build on our solutions, not just around them,” said inMotion Robotic CEO Kai Leuze. “ROS2 support removes the need for custom driver development or SDKs, making our robots immediately usable for research teams, integrators and developers across Europe.”
Distribution is the underrated lever
OLO COO and co-founder Eleanor Tang-Smith framed the launch in terms of operational friction rather than skills. “When you sit with customers, they rarely talk about a ‘skills crisis’. They talk about ideas they can't get to, projects that stall, and teams who give up because the tools get in the way. Our focus is removing that friction so the people closest to the problem can build and deploy the systems they've been imagining.”
The OLO launch arrives alongside a wave of robotics partnerships that are positioning shared software layers across separate hardware vendors. Recent moves include Japan Airlines's Unitree humanoid trial at Haneda Airport, Hugging Face's open-source LeRobot humanoid, and Catalyst Brands' Figure AI deployment.
Reporting based on coverage from RoboticsTomorrow.