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Introduction

White paper for the R&D community. This document presents the architecture, design decisions, developer experience, wire protocol, and deployment topologies of OpenRoIS, an open-source middleware implementing the OMG Robotic Interaction Service (RoIS) Framework 2.0. It is written for robotics researchers, HRI engineers, and platform integrators evaluating or adopting the RoIS standard.

Controlling robots from software applications has long suffered from a fragmentation problem. Each robot platform exposes its own hardware-specific API (find face, wheel control, read battery). Any hardware change forces an application rewrite, which kills reusability and slows research transfer from simulation to deployment.

The OMG Robotic Interaction Service (RoIS) Framework addresses this by defining a platform-independent model for human-robot interaction (HRI) at the symbolic level. Instead of raw sensor data and motor commands, applications exchange structured messages: "a person was detected", "approach the person", "say this message". All hardware-specific concerns are hidden behind standardized interfaces.

A specification alone does not drive adoption. Researchers and engineers need a usable implementation: a clean SDK, reference adapters for real robotics ecosystems, a gateway that bridges the spec's interfaces to the network, and a component library that demonstrates the full stack working end to end.

OpenRoIS is that implementation. It is an open-source, Apache-2.0 licensed middleware that implements the OMG RoIS Framework 2.0 and lets operator applications control physical robots, virtual avatars, and digital agents over the internet through a single, paradigm-neutral SDK.

Contributions​

This white paper describes the following contributions:

  1. A paradigm-neutral architecture for RoIS 2.0 that decouples the engine, gateway, and client SDK from any specific middleware through a four-method BusAdapter contract (BusAdapter Contract).
  2. A single-source-of-truth type pipeline that authors interfaces as Python Pydantic models and generates C# and TypeScript types from a canonical JSON Schema, keeping three language stacks consistent without manual synchronization (Interface Type Pipeline).
  3. A JSON-RPC 2.0 wire protocol mapping of the five RoIS interfaces over WebSocket, with full message examples for every interface operation (Wire Protocol).
  4. Three client SDKs (C# for Unity, TypeScript for web, Python for scripting) that expose identical behavior regardless of the host paradigm behind the gateway (Developer Experience).
  5. Four deployment topologies that compose the same layers into physical robots, mixed fleets, single-process avatars, and distributed services (Deployment Topologies).
  6. A transport strategy that selects the right transport at each boundary rather than forcing one everywhere (Transport Strategy).

Target audience​

This document is written for:

  • Robotics researchers evaluating RoIS 2.0 as a standard for HRI scenarios.
  • HRI engineers building operator applications for robots or avatars.
  • Platform integrators connecting existing robotics stacks (ROS 2, Unity, gRPC services) to a standard interface.
  • Standards participants interested in how a beta specification translates to a working implementation.

Status​

Alpha, pre-1.0, unstable API. Only the interfaces layer (M0) is complete. The engine, gateway, bus adapters, components, and SDKs are planned or under construction. The OMG RoIS Framework is at version 2.0-beta2 and may change.