Otto Motors

"OTTO Motors, branded since the 2023 acquisition as OTTO by Rockwell Automation, is the industrial autonomous mobile robot business of Clearpath Robotics in Kitchener, Ontario. Clearpath was founded in 2009 by four University of Waterloo graduates and launched OTTO Motors as a separate brand in April 2016 to address large-scale autonomous material handling in manufacturing, warehousing and distribution. Rockwell Automation signed an agreement to buy Clearpath and OTTO in September 2023 and completed the acquisition in October 2023, in a deal reported at roughly USD 600 million; both brands continue to trade under their own names and websites from the Kitchener site at 1425 Strasburg Road.

The industrial line runs from light to heavy payloads. OTTO 100 carries up to 150 kg for light delivery work, OTTO 600 up to 600 kg, OTTO 1200 up to 1,200 kg, and OTTO 1500 up to 1,900 kg; OTTO Lifter handles up to 1,200 kg with lifting capability for pallet work. Two software products sit above the fleet: OTTO Autonomy for on-vehicle navigation and OTTO Fleet Manager for traffic, task allocation and monitoring across a site. The company reports more than 16 million production hours accumulated, over 1.3 million deliveries a month, and more than 100 AMR fleets deployed. Named users include Amway, Caterpillar, Celestica, Dell Technologies, Ford, GE Aerospace, GE HealthCare, Hershey, Hirotec and Mauser Packaging Solutions, and General Electric was the first customer when the brand launched. Automotive, consumer products and food and beverage are the stated target industries.

The Clearpath side of the business continues to sell research and development platforms on its own website: the Warthog and Husky A300 outdoor unmanned ground vehicles, Jackal, the indoor Ridgeback and Dingo, and the TurtleBot 4 learning platform, all supplied ROS 2 ready, together with an accessories store covering lidar, cameras and manipulators. That line serves universities and corporate research groups rather than production floors, and is the reason a single company appears in the market under two quite different identities. The operation holds ISO 9001:2015 certification.

For database purposes the two identities are one company and are recorded here as one row. OTTO Motors has never been an independent corporate entity separate from Clearpath, and it has never been owned by Uber; the Uber transaction of 2016 involved Otto, also known as Ottomotto, the self-driving truck startup founded by Anthony Levandowski, which has no connection to this business beyond the similarity of name."