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, .srv and .action files 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.