Dynamic Safety Guardrails for NAV2/ROS Now Available

Robotics community,

3Laws Supervisor ROS Community Edition is now deeply integrated with NAV2, bringing Dynamic Safety to production autonomy stacks for AMRs, AGVs, forklifts, and other mobile robots.

The 3Laws Supervisor sits in the command path and adjusts velocity or paths only in edge cases. The robot keeps pursuing its goal while avoiding hazards, favoring avoidance over slow-and-stop behaviors.

Early adopters are using this integration to handle multi-robot deconfliction, narrow passages, and human-dense, dynamic environments with higher uptime and fewer interventions.

The Supervisor plugs into the NAV2 post-processing pipeline as a drop-in replacement for the traditional collision monitor and velocity smoother.

Key Benefits of NAV2 / 3Laws Integration

Maximize Throughput and ROI with Dynamic Safety

Dynamic Safety modifies commands just enough at runtime to keep the robot moving at the highest safe speed. Compared with static or purely kinematic safety, this yields higher throughput and better asset utilization.

Robust in Multi-Agent, Complex Environments

The Supervisor enables automatic behaviors to route around blocked paths and obstacles, reducing gridlocks and deadlocks. It supports blind aisles, mixed-fleet interactions, and human co-existence by leveraging continuous sensing and continuous control.

Lower Autonomy Stack Complexity

By decoupling goal pursuit from obstacle avoidance, the Supervisor sharply reduces behavior tree complexity and brittle “if-this-then-that” logic. Teams can focus on product differentiation instead of special-case safety glue code.

Open-Source Core, Flexible Integration

Build on NAV2’s production-grade, modular framework maintained by Open Navigation. Integration is straightforward: remap topics from the collision monitor, remove it, and insert the 3Laws Supervisor. This architecture lets you swap in components—such as the new Navigation Graph Routing and Tracking Server—without destabilizing the stack.

Enterprise-Grade Reliability with Provable Safety

The Supervisor enforces safety constraints in real time using Control Barrier Functions (CBFs), supporting compliance and risk reduction against standards like ISO 13849 and ISO 10218. The Supervisor ROS Community Edition is free for all R&D use; startups with ≤$500,000 in annual revenue can also use it free in production.

Using the New Route Server for Advanced Planning

This integration pairs with NAV2’s Navigation Graph Routing and Tracking Server, which enables lane-aware routing with application-specific rules. It supports progress tracking, place-based triggers, and use in mixed environments like agriculture or roadways.

Getting Started

A detailed tutorial is available on docs.nav2.org for integrating 3Laws Supervisor into your NAV2 stack.

Download NAV2: Available under Apache 2.0 (for most components) at nav2.org.

Download 3Laws Supervisor ROS CE: Access the free Community Edition at 3laws.io/supervisor.

The NAV2 and 3Laws integration is designed to make NAV2-based robots safer and more robust in real deployments—and to get more systems successfully out of the lab and into the field.