Hello ROS Community,
I’m the founder of BotBot, and I’m excited to share a project we’ve been working on that we hope will be a valuable contribution to the ROS2 ecosystem. We’ve just open-sourced BotBrain, a modular software and hardware platform designed to be a universal brain for legged robots.
Our main goal was to create a robust, integrated system that handles the foundational parts of robotics development, letting engineers and researchers focus more on high-level behaviors. BotBrain is built from the ground up on ROS2 Humble and provides a complete, out-of-the-box solution for navigation, control, and system management. It includes a pre-configured Nav2 stack using RTABMap for VSLAM, a full lifecycle and state management system, and a clear interface for integrating custom robot platforms. We currently have support for quadrupeds and humanoids like the Unitree Go2, Go2-W and G1, but the architecture is designed to be easily extended.
To complement the software, we’re also releasing the designs for our 3D-printable hardware. The enclosure houses an NVIDIA Jetson nano and Intel RealSense cameras, with snap-fit mounts that make it easy to get a fully integrated perception and compute system running on your robot quickly. The whole system is managed through a web-based UI for teleoperation and mission planning, which communicates with the ROS2 backend.
We’re releasing BotBrain under the MIT license because we believe in the power of community-driven development. We welcome all contributions, whether it’s adding support for a new robot, improving the navigation stack, or fixing a bug. You can find the code and hardware files on our GitHub, and we’ve set up a Discord for community discussion.
We are also working on a Pro version for professional/enterprise use and will feature the AGX Orin or Thor depending on use cases.
Discord Community: BotBot
We look forward to hearing your feedback and seeing what you build with it.