ROS is the middleware most modern robotics software is built on — a node, topic, service and action model with a large ecosystem of drivers, planners and tools. ROS 2 rebuilt it on DDS for real-time, multi-robot and production use, replacing the original central master with a discovery model suited to fielded systems.
ROS
ROS is the closest thing robotics has to a universal software substrate, and it is genuine, deep, open interoperability — inside the robot. Nodes publish to topics, call services and run actions, and a driver written for one arm can often be swapped for another without touching the code above it.
- Topics, services and actions - Pub/sub for streams, request/response for queries, and long-running goals with feedback — a richer interaction model than HTTP offers.
- Message definitions as contracts -
.msg,.srvand.actionfiles are typed interface definitions, versioned with the package that ships them. - DDS underneath ROS 2 - Real-time pub/sub with QoS policies, which is what makes it viable on a fielded machine.
- An enormous ecosystem - Navigation, manipulation, perception and simulation packages that constitute most of applied robotics.
- Not a web API - Discovery is on the local network; there is no public endpoint, and that is by design.
ROS matters to this research for what it shows about where robotics standardisation happens. The State of Robotics & Autonomous Systems APIs finds a market where 5.8% of companies publish a machine-readable web contract — and ROS is the reason that number is not the whole story. The interfaces exist and are richly specified; they live on the control network, behind the customer’s firewall, described in message definitions rather than in an OpenAPI. The gap the report measures is the operational layer above ROS — fleet state, task assignment, telemetry history — where an integrator or an agent works, and where no equivalent standard exists.
Referenced in API Evangelist papers
This standard shows up in my published research. These reports read the machine-readable evidence provider by provider — and put this standard in the context of a real sector.
The State of Robotics & Autonomous Systems APIs
The reason robotics' 5.8% public-contract rate is not the whole story: the interfaces exist and are richly specified, on the control network rather than the web.
