UK-based OLO Robotics has completed its commercial launch, unveiling manufacturing and distribution partnerships with China's Deep Robotics, Germany's inMotion Robotic and Poland's Fiction Lab. The deals are designed to make robot hardware accessible to mainstream software teams rather than only specialist roboticists.
An accessibility layer on top of ROS2
OLO provides a layer on top of ROS2, the open-source Robot Operating System, bringing the full robotics development environment into the browser. The platform includes cloud simulation, AI-assisted coding, visualization and sim-to-real deployment, supports JavaScript and Python, and requires no local installation. It connects directly to existing ROS2 robots and drivers, echoing a wider push to make traditional automation less expensive and rigid.
Three partners, one platform
Fiction Lab's modular LEO Rover, used by universities and engineering teams, can now be ordered with OLO as an optional bundle, letting customers program against a simulated rover in the cloud before hardware ships. Deep Robotics and inMotion Robotic worked with OLO to ensure their quadrupeds and mobile robots run on the platform from first use, removing the need for separate integration projects.
"Because OLO is built on ROS2, our robots work with the platform from day one, without additional integration work," said Yatao Zhang, director of Europe and Africa at Deep Robotics. Kai Leuze, CEO of inMotion Robotic, said ROS2 support "removes the need for custom driver development or SDKs."
Rethinking the robotics skills gap
"The industry has spent a decade talking about a skills shortage as if the only answer is to train more roboticists," said Nick Thompson, OLO's co-founder and CEO. "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 approach parallels efforts to embed AI more deeply into engineering workflows.
Lowering the barrier to deployment
For manufacturers, the model lets ROS2-compatible systems reach integrators and developers without custom driver development, widening the pool of teams able to build on their platforms. Co-founder and COO Eleanor Tang-Smith said the goal is "removing that friction so the people closest to the problem can build and deploy the systems they've been imagining," a theme echoed by large-scale rollouts such as Maersk's autonomous warehouse robots.
Reporting based on coverage from Robotics & Automation News.