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Related Work and Positioning

RoIS and other HRI standards​

RoIS is not the only standard addressing human-robot interaction. However, it is unique in defining a platform-independent model at the symbolic level, separate from any transport. Other approaches tend to couple the interface to a specific middleware (for example, ROS actions, gRPC services, or CORBA operations). RoIS defines the messages and lets the implementation choose the transport, which is the property OpenRoIS exploits through the BusAdapter contract.

OpenRoIS and ROS 2​

ROS 2 is the dominant research robotics middleware and one of the spec's approved transports. OpenRoIS does not compete with ROS 2. It uses ROS 2 as the primary robot bus adapter (ROS2BusAdapter). RoIS operations map to ROS 2 primitives: synchronous operations to services, long-running operations to actions, async push to topics. The value OpenRoIS adds is a standardized symbolic interface above ROS 2, so that the same operator application can also drive a virtual avatar or a distributed service without rewriting the scenario logic.

OpenRoIS and Unity​

Unity is the primary client platform for operator applications. The C# SDK targets Unity via UPM and runs on both Mono (Unity 6.3+) and CoreCLR (Unity 6.8). The same SDK also works outside Unity (any .NET runtime). The in-process avatar topology means a Unity application can host the engine, gateway, and avatar components in a single process, with zero serialization overhead.

Conformance​

An implementation claiming RoIS conformance shall:

  • Provide the interfaces described in the RoIS specification section 8.2.
  • Support the message data structures described in section 8.3 (RoIS Profiles).
  • Support the Common Messages of section 8.4 for the basic components it implements (it need not implement every basic component).
  • Handle component profiles described as XML files and the messages defined therein.

OpenRoIS targets full conformance. The interface types are cross-checked against the normative XML profiles and validated against XML-Profiles.xsd in CI. A conformance test suite asserts behavior against the spec's interfaces and profiles, run against every BusAdapter.

Conclusion

OpenRoIS demonstrates that the OMG RoIS Framework 2.0 can be implemented as a practical, paradigm-neutral middleware with clean developer experience. The key insight is that the spec's separation of message from transport enables a single BusAdapter contract to decouple the engine from ROS 2, in-process runtimes, gRPC services, and any future paradigm. Adding a new paradigm is an additive adapter, never a rewrite.

The single-source-of-truth type pipeline (Python Pydantic to JSON Schema to C# and TypeScript) keeps three language stacks consistent without manual synchronization. The JSON-RPC 2.0 wire protocol over WebSocket provides a browser-native, NAT-friendly control plane with full async event support. The three SDKs (C# for Unity, TypeScript for web, Python for scripting) expose identical behavior regardless of the host paradigm behind the gateway.

The project is in alpha. The interfaces layer is complete. The engine, gateway, bus adapters, components, and SDKs are under construction. Researchers and engineers evaluating RoIS 2.0 can use OpenRoIS as a reference implementation, contribute reference components, or build applications against the SDK today.

Getting involved​

Contributions are welcome. The milestone roadmap defines clear, parallelizable work items. Reference components are the natural entry point for new contributors.

OpenRoIS is an open-source middleware for the OMG RoIS Framework 2.0. Control robots, avatars, and digital agents from one paradigm-neutral SDK. Apache-2.0. Alpha, pre-1.0, unstable API.