CoroWare announces ROS upgrade offer for Corobot owners

Press release from CoroWare

Kirkland, WA - January 31, 2012 - CoroWare, Inc. (COWI.OB), today announced a new upgrade offer for existing CoroBot® Classic and CoroBot Explorer unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) customers. These upgrades will help bring earlier CoroBot UGV models up to date, and will enable a new class of CoroBot applications based on ROS from Willow Garage.

The ROS software platform is rapidly becoming the standard for open robotics development, and has a large and active developer community. CoroWare's ROS Upgrade Program will help its customers migrate their existing CoroBot UGV platforms, which is based on Linux and Player software distributions, to Robot Operating System (ROS), which has been deployed on unmanned ground vehicles, air vehicles, and surface vehicles around the world.

"Willow Garage is delivering the ROS software platform with which vendors, such as CoroWare, can provide affordable and open mobile robot platforms that robot scientists need for prototyping robotics applications," said Brian Gerkey of Willow Garage. "CoroWare's announcement today will help grow the community of robotics researchers and educators who are building applications based on ROS."

CoroWare's ROS Upgrade Program includes an initial assessment of the CoroBot that the customer purchased. For some customers, software upgrades will only be required and will be free of charge. For other customers who purchased older CoroBot models, hardware upgrades may be required and will be priced accordingly.

"CoroWare's ROS Upgrade Program will give our customers a greater choice of ROS-based applications and software modules to run on their existing CoroBot platforms", said Andrew Zager, product marketing engineer at CoroWare. "Because ROS is not limited to any robotics platform, we look forward to migrating any third party mobile robots and applications to ROS in the future."

CoroWare's ROS Upgrade Program for all CoroBot platforms is available now. Customers may get further details by visiting our website at robotics.coroware.com; or sending e-mail inquiries to sales@coroware.com, or contacting us at 1-800-641-2676, option 1.