In 2012, the ROS-Industrial open source project started as the collaboration of Yaskawa Motoman Robotics (http://www.motoman.com/), Willow Garage (https://www.willowgarage.com/) and Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) at http://www.swri.org/ for using ROS research and development in Industrial manufacturing. The ROS-I was founded by Shaun Edwards in January 2012.

In 2013, the ROS-I Consortium Americas launched in March 2013 led by SwRI and ROS-I Consortium Europe led by Fraunhofer IPA in Germany.