KORTHOS / ECOSYSTEM / PRODUCT

Jackal

About

About Jackal

Jackal is Clearpath Robotics' compact weatherproof unmanned ground vehicle for outdoor autonomy research. Its onboard computer, GPS and inertial measurement unit arrive integrated with ROS, giving laboratories a mobile base for navigation, perception and field-robotics development.

The skid-steer platform supports a range of compatible sensors, manipulators and compute accessories, but those additions remain optional configurations. Jackal's core role is rugged ground mobility and experimentation, not every task enabled by an attached payload. The existing winter field photograph is a genuine exact-product 16:9 contextual hero.

Capabilities

Source-backed capabilities

  • Target markets: Robot developer platform
  • Multi-vehicle coordination

    Research demonstration - 2025-10-30 - Heterogeneous robot collaboration paper runs real-world missions with Clearpath Jackal

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Supply

Supply / Components

  • Jackal

    Wibotic Wireless Charging Kit For Jackal - Power Systems - WiBotic - Clearpath sells a WiBotic wireless charging kit that can be factory-installed on or retrofitted to Jackal - source: clearpathrobotics.com

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  • Clearpath custom Jackal UGV

    Edge AI Compute Module - Compute & Control - NVIDIA - Clearpath integrated NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin in a custom Jackal UGV configuration - source: clearpathrobotics.com

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  • Clearpath custom Jackal UGV

    Machine Vision Camera - Perception - Teledyne FLIR - Clearpath integrated five Teledyne FLIR Blackfly cameras in a custom Jackal UGV configuration - source: clearpathrobotics.com

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  • Clearpath Jackal

    Intel Based Onboard Computer - Compute & Control - Intel - Intel supplies compute control to Clearpath Robotics for Clearpath Jackal - source: docs.clearpathrobotics.com

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  • Clearpath custom Jackal UGV

    LIDAR Sensor - Perception - Ouster - Clearpath integrated an Ouster OS1 3D lidar in a custom Jackal UGV configuration - source: clearpathrobotics.com

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Research

  • VASO: Formally Verifiable Self-Evolving Skills for Physical AI Agents

    2026-06-03 - Research Publication - Reusable robot skills are becoming the basic units through which embodied agents turn open-ended instructions into long-horizon physical behavior.

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  • Safety-Constrained Reinforcement Learning with Post-Training Reachability Verification for Robot Navigation

    2026-05-13 - Research Publication - Safe navigation for mobile robots demands policies that remain reliable under the high-consequence perception uncertainty of cluttered environments.

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  • RVN-Bench: A Benchmark for Reactive Visual Navigation

    2026-03-04 - Research Publication - To address this limitation, the authors introduce the reactive visual navigation benchmark (RVN-Bench), a collision-aware benchmark for indoor mobile robots.

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  • YOPO-Nav: Visual Navigation using 3DGS Graphs from One-Pass Videos

    2025-12-10 - Research Publication - Visual navigation has emerged as a practical alternative to traditional robotic navigation pipelines that rely on detailed mapping and path planning.

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  • Heterogeneous Robot Collaboration in Unstructured Environments with Grounded Generative Intelligence

    2025-10-30 - Research Publication - Heterogeneous robot teams operating in realistic settings often must accomplish complex missions requiring collaboration and adaptation to information acquired online.

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  • Zero to Autonomy in Real-Time: Online Adaptation of Dynamics in Unstructured Environments

    2025-09-15 - Research Publication - Autonomous robots must go from zero prior knowledge to safe control within seconds to operate in unstructured environments.

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  • OVITA: Open-Vocabulary Interpretable Trajectory Adaptations

    2025-08-24 - Research Publication - Adapting trajectories to dynamic situations and user preferences is crucial for robot operation in unstructured environments with non-expert users.

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  • Jailbreaking LLM-Controlled Robots

    2024-10-17 - Research Publication - The recent introduction of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized the field of robotics by enabling contextual reasoning and intuitive human-robot interaction in domains as varied as manipulation, locomotion, and self-driving vehicles.

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  • SunnyGuang/Clearpath-Jackal

    2024-07-23 - Research Publication - The repository provides a small Jackal-focused ROS/Gazebo setup with GMapping, odometry navigation and UST-10 lidar configuration.

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  • Speech-Guided Sequential Planning for Autonomous Navigation using Large Language Model Meta AI 3 (Llama3)

    2024-07-13 - Research Publication - In social robotics, a pivotal focus is enabling robots to engage with humans in a more natural and seamless manner.

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  • Autonomous Ground Navigation in Highly Constrained Spaces: Lessons learned from The 3rd BARN Challenge at ICRA 2024

    2024-07-02 - Research Publication - Adds a Jackal benchmark/navigation artifact from the BARN physical challenge.

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  • Sensor-Based Distributionally Robust Control for Safe Robot Navigation in Dynamic Environments

    2024-05-28 - Research Publication - We introduce a novel method for mobile robot navigation in dynamic, unknown environments, leveraging onboard sensing and distributionally robust optimization to impose probabilistic safety constraints. Our method introduces a distributionally robust control barrier function (DR-CBF) that directly integrates noisy sensor measurements and state estimates to define safety constraints.

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  • ROS2swarm - A ROS 2 Package for Swarm Robot Behaviors

    2024-05-03 - Research Publication - Developing reusable software for mobile robots is still challenging. Even more so for swarm robots, despite the desired simplicity of the robot controllers. Prototyping and experimenting are difficult due to the multi-robot setting and often require robot-robot communication. Also, the diversity of swarm robot hardware platforms increases the need for hardware-independent software concepts. The main advantages of the

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  • TopoNav: Topological Navigation for Efficient Exploration in Sparse Reward Environments

    2024-02-06 - Research Publication - Autonomous robots exploring unknown environments face a significant challenge: navigating effectively without prior maps and with limited external feedback.

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  • AG-CVG: Coverage Planning with a Mobile Recharging UGV and an Energy-Constrained UAV

    2023-10-11 - Research Publication - In this paper, we present an approach for coverage path planning for a team of an energy-constrained Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV).

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  • Teach and Repeat Navigation: A Robust Control Approach

    2023-09-27 - Research Publication - Robot navigation requires an autonomy pipeline that is robust to environmental changes and effective in varying conditions.

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  • Mobile Manipulation Platform for Autonomous Indoor Inspections in Low-Clearance Areas

    2023-09-19 - Research Publication - Mobile manipulators have been used for inspection, maintenance and repair tasks over the years, but there are some key limitations.

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  • Deadlock-free, Safe, and Decentralized Multi-Robot Navigation in Social Mini-Games via Discrete-Time Control Barrier Functions

    2023-08-21 - Research Publication - We present an approach to ensure safe and deadlock-free navigation for decentralized multi-robot systems operating in constrained environments, including doorways and intersections.

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  • Autonomous Ground Navigation in Highly Constrained Spaces: Lessons learned from The 2nd BARN Challenge at ICRA 2023

    2023-08-06 - Research Publication - The 2nd BARN (Benchmark Autonomous Robot Navigation) Challenge took place at the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2023) in London, UK and continued to evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art autonomous ground navigation systems in highly constrained environments.

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  • Decentralized Social Navigation with Non-Cooperative Robots via Bi-Level Optimization

    2023-06-15 - Research Publication - This paper presents a fully decentralized approach for realtime non-cooperative multi-robot navigation in social mini-games, such as navigating through a narrow doorway or negotiating right of way at a corridor intersection.

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  • Foundations of Spatial Perception for Robotics: Hierarchical Representations and Real-time Systems

    2023-05-11 - Research Publication - 3D spatial perception is the problem of building and maintaining an actionable and persistent representation of the environment in real-time using sensor data and prior knowledge.

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  • One-4-All: Neural Potential Fields for Embodied Navigation

    2023-03-07 - Research Publication - This paper covers One-4-All: Neural Potential Fields for Embodied Navigation for Jackal UGV in Navigation.

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  • GNM: A General Navigation Model to Drive Any Robot

    2022-10-07 - Research Publication - Adds a foundational Jackal/navigation model artifact with project-page utility.

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  • Physically-Feasible Repair of Reactive, Linear Temporal Logic-based, High-Level Tasks

    2022-07-06 - Research Publication - A typical approach to creating complex robot behaviors is to compose atomic controllers, or skills, such that the resulting behavior satisfies a high-level task; however, when a task cannot be accomplished with a given set of skills, it is difficult to know how to modify the skills to make the task possible.

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  • Is it Worth to Reason about Uncertainty in Occupancy Grid Maps during Path Planning?

    2022-05-27 - Research Publication - This paper investigates the usefulness of reasoning about the uncertain presence of obstacles during path planning, which typically stems from the usage of probabilistic occupancy grid maps for representing the environment when mapping via a noisy sensor like a stereo camera.

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  • Socially Compliant Navigation Dataset (SCAND): A Large-Scale Dataset of Demonstrations for Social Navigation

    2022-03-28 - Research Publication - Social navigation is the capability of an autonomous agent, such as a robot, to navigate in a 'socially compliant' manner in the presence of other intelligent agents such as humans.

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  • Socially CompliAnt Navigation Dataset (SCAND)

    2022-01-01 - Research Publication - Adds a dataset artifact for both Jackal and Spot social navigation research.

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  • GANav: Efficient Terrain Segmentation for Robot Navigation in Unstructured Outdoor Environments

    2021-03-07 - Research Publication - We propose GANav, a novel group-wise attention mechanism to identify safe and navigable regions in off-road terrains and unstructured environments from RGB images.

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  • Fast and Robust Bio-inspired Teach and Repeat Navigation

    2020-10-21 - Research Publication - Fully autonomous mobile robots have a multitude of potential applications, but guaranteeing robust navigation performance remains an open research problem.

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  • ProxEmo: Gait-based Emotion Learning and Multi-view Proxemic Fusion for Socially-Aware Robot Navigation

    2020-03-02 - Research Publication - We present ProxEmo, a novel end-to-end emotion prediction algorithm for socially aware robot navigation among pedestrians.

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  • Perception as prediction using general value functions in autonomous driving applications

    2020-01-24 - Research Publication - We propose and demonstrate a framework called perception as prediction for autonomous driving that uses general value functions (GVFs) to learn predictions.

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  • A Receding Horizon Framework for Autonomy in Unmanned Vehicles

    2019-06-25 - Research Publication - In this article the authors present a unified framework based on receding horizon techniques that can be used to design the three tasks (guidance, navigation and path-planning) which are involved in the autonomy of unmanned vehicles.

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  • ScoutBot: A Dialogue System for Collaborative Navigation

    2018-07-21 - Research Publication - ScoutBot is a dialogue interface to physical and simulated robots that supports collaborative exploration of environments.

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  • RobustFieldAutonomyLab/jackal_dataset_20170608

    2018-06-30 - Research Publication - Bag files captured using a Clearpath Jackal Robot, which is equipped with a Velodyne VLP-16 and low-end IMU sensor. The published point cloud topic is \velodyne_points. The published IMU data topic is \imu\data.

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Timeline

  • Clearpath demonstrates Hovermap integration on Jackal UGV

    2025-08-07 - Demonstration - Clearpath mounted Emesent's self-contained Hovermap LiDAR mapping unit on a Jackal UGV and operated it at an outdoor industrial facility. The integration combined Jackal's ground mobility with Hovermap's SLAM-based 3D capture for mapping areas that are difficult to survey manually. The demonstration showed how the sensor package can extend a research UGV into repeatable industrial reality-capture workflows.

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  • Clearpath integrates Accerion positioning for precise mobile-robot navigation

    2020-04-16 - Demonstration - Accerion’s optical positioning system scans the floor while the robot moves, measuring pure displacement to deliver submillimeter-level accuracy and high speed without special floor infrastructure. The system was integrated with Clearpath’s Jackal UGV, which Accerion used daily in its labs for development, testing and customer demonstrations. Accerion’s Jupiter and Triton models support all-in-one or add-on positioning, while its virtual line-following approach lets robots change routes without physically painted lines; the source also cites a U.S. packaging customer using Jackal robots.

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Context

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