InOrbit.AI has appointed robotics industry veteran Steve Cousins to its Board of Directors and announced the upcoming open-source release of OpenRobOps (ORO), a full-featured fleet management platform built on proven technology already operating thousands of robots in production. These moves aim to standardize robot connectivity and operations infrastructure, resolve the persistent “build vs. buy” dilemma in robotics, and accelerate scalable deployment of smart robot fleets across enterprises.
Steve Cousins brings decades of robotics leadership and open-source advocacy to InOrbit’s board. As CEO of Willow Garage, he drove widespread adoption of the Robot Operating System (ROS). He later founded Savioke, an early commercializer of ROS-based robots, and has served as a founding board member of the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) and Executive Director of the Stanford Robotics Center.
“InOrbit is doing for fleet operations what ROS did for robot development,” said Cousins. “Savioke was an early InOrbit customer, so I saw firsthand the value of the platform. I joined the board because I see the need in the broader robotics community: standardizing the common infrastructure is necessary to unlock the next wave of innovation and scale.”
The robotics industry has long faced a critical bottleneck: companies must either build proprietary fleet management systems from scratch—diverting resources from core innovation—or adopt closed solutions that sacrifice control and flexibility. InOrbit is addressing this by contributing OpenRobOps (ORO) to the open-source community.
ORO is a full fleet management and robot operations platform derived from InOrbit’s production technology, which already manages thousands of robots. Offered under a permissive license, ORO will provide developers with:
Florian Pestoni, Founder and CEO of InOrbit, stated: “I’ve talked to too many founders in robotics who are reinventing the wheel and failing to scale. By open-sourcing the core operations layer, we empower developers to own their data and infrastructure. End users can more easily orchestrate robots across vendors by using InOrbit Space Intelligence, our award-winning, AI-powered platform.”
For teams preferring managed services, InOrbit offers Ground Control (a commercial, fully hosted implementation of ORO with advanced features and support) and Space Intelligence (AI-powered orchestration). This tiered approach allows organizations to start with open-source, adopt managed services, or transition between them without architectural disruption.
ORO launches with strong support from leading robotics organizations:
Additional endorsements come from Dr. Lorenzo Masia (MIRMI, TUM), Ricardo Petrazzini (Robotic Crew), and others.
By open-sourcing a proven fleet management foundation and adding strategic board expertise, InOrbit aims to eliminate fragmentation, lower barriers to scale, and enable the robotics industry to shift focus from infrastructure reinvention to innovation and deployment of intelligent, connected robot fleets.
OpenRobOps will be released under a permissive open-source license later in 2026, with early partner collaboration already underway.
About InOrbit
InOrbit.AI is the leader in software-defined orchestration for the physical world. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, InOrbit is innovating at the intersection of Agentic AI and Physical AI, empowering enterprises to optimize the flow of goods, people, and data in the physical world.
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