The robotics industry is expanding fast, but a hidden challenge is slowing down real-world adoption and scaling. We call it the build trap.
Robot OEMs (original equipment manufacturers), systems integrators and researchers face a common challenge as they expand from single-robot to large scale deployments. Their customers and users expect to use a fleet manager to manage these growing numbers of robots. In response, engineers are spending years developing and maintaining custom user interfaces, backends, and databases or cobbling together some tools that were designed for different purposes. They end up recreating the same basic fleet management functionality instead of focusing on the core robotic innovations that differentiate their hardware.
Today we are releasing OpenRobOps to fix this. OpenRobOps or ORO is a full-featured robot operations and fleet management open-source software platform designed to work with any kind of robot. Developers have full flexibility to bundle it with their robots, personalize or extend it to handle unique needs. We are so confident that this will be incredibly valuable to the robotics community, that we called it ORO, which is gold in Spanish.
OpenRobOps is a major step forward for industry standardization. Today’s release delivers the world's first reference implementation of the ISO 21423 standard. This specification, which will be officially published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in the coming weeks, establishes the communication and data exchange standards between industrial mobile robots (IMRs) and fleet managers (IMRFMs).
The standard follows the federated architecture model pioneered by InOrbit.AI. Our founder and CEO, Florian Pestoni, was an active participant in the international working group that developed the standard and advocated for a balanced, market-based trade-off between multi-robot coordination and vendor differentiation. A good standard doesn’t force everyone to the lowest common denominator; it enables the industry as a whole to deliver more value.
Earlier this year at Automate 2026 in Chicago, we demonstrated multi-vendor orchestration using InOrbit Space Intelligence, including the first known public use of the ISO 21423. With OpenRobOps, we are bringing the technology that powered those demonstrations directly to the open-source community, taking this landmark international interoperability standard from theory to market practice.
Open source is always about the community. OpenRobOps has garnered the support of influential figures in the open source robotics community, including Geoffrey Biggs, CTO at Open Robotics; Brian Gerkey, CTO at Intrinsic and Board Chair at Open Robotics. Steve Cousins, Executive Director of the Stanford Robotics Center, InOrbit Board Member and previously CEO at Willow Garage and Savioke, noted that OpenRobOps creates a similar shift for robot operations and fleet management that ROS did for on-robot development.
While ORO can work with any robot, it fits perfectly into the ROS ecosystem, sitting between the robot and orchestration layer. With built-in support of Open RMF, developed with contributions from Ekumen, A Grid Dynamics Company, ORO replaces ad-hoc "Free Fleet" implementations, providing a persistent and secure fleet management layer.
Distributed under the permissive Apache 2.0 license, OpenRobOps allows researchers, startups, and mature robotics companies to develop a complete solution.
Key features include:
The future of robotics relies on collaboration. Standard-compliant, community-supported OpenRobOps is driving interoperability and helping scale robotics around the world. Learn more at openrobops.org.