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Software and middleware

Compare the software layer of physical AI: middleware, realtime transport, teleoperation, observability. Licence, governance and dated shifts.

This layer lives between the model and the motors: our physical AI stack pillar explains where it fits. We also track licence and governance shifts: a brick that is open today can close tomorrow, and that is the question that matters when you commit to it for ten years.

Updated 2026-10-11 · 11 entries · JSON

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Name Organization Category License Open source ROS First release Latest shift

ROS 2 is the de facto standard middleware of robotics: it carries messages between a robot's processes (sensor drivers, perception, planning, motor control) over a DDS or Zenoh transport layer. Since April 2024 its technical governance sits with the Open Source Robotics Alliance rather than a single company.

Governance : Comité technique de l'OSRA depuis avril 2024, supervisant le Project Management Committee de ROS sous l'autorité du conseil d'Open Robotics (OSRF).Current version : Lyrical Luth (22 mai 2026, LTS jusqu'en mai 2031)Used by : NASA VIPER (rover lunaire)declaredAuterion (pile logicielle drones PX4)declaredOTTO Motors (robots mobiles autonomes industriels)declaredMission Robotics (véhicule sous-marin)declared
Shifts

  1. First release Neutral

    First ROS 2 distribution, Ardent Apalone.

  2. Governance Neutral

    Intrinsic, an Alphabet company, acquires the for-profit arms of Open Robotics. The nonprofit foundation continues separately and keeps the intellectual property of ROS, Gazebo and Open-RMF.

    Source: Open Robotics (official blog)

  3. Governance Opening

    Open Robotics announces the Open Source Robotics Alliance, a mixed-membership body giving companies and community a formal role in the technical direction of ROS, Gazebo and Open-RMF. It starts on 15 April 2024, fifteen months after the Alphabet acquisition : two moves in opposite directions.

    Source: Open Robotics

  4. Archived Neutral

    ROS 1 reaches end of life with its last distribution, Noetic Ninjemys, aligned on Ubuntu Focal losing standard support.

Sources: GitHub, official ros2/ros2cli repository (2026-08-27)ROS 2 documentation (official repository) (2026-08-27)Open Robotics (2024-03-18)Open Robotics (2026-08-27)ROS 2 documentation (official repository) (2026-08-27)Open Robotics Discourse (team ROS 2) (2017-12-08)Open Robotics (2022-05-12)Open Robotics (official blog) (2022-12-15)Open Robotics Discourse (ROS PMC) (2025-04-10) Last verified 2026-10-10

Cyclone DDS implements the OMG Data Distribution Service 1.4 standard (published March 2015) and is one of the middleware options officially supported by ROS 2. It is governed by the Eclipse Foundation, so no single vendor controls it.

Governance : Committers élus de l'Eclipse Foundation ; ZettaScale Technology est le principal contributeur de code.Current version : 11.0.1 (20 mars 2026)Used by : Ghost Robotics (quadrupèdes)declaredSeegrid, ex-Box Robotics (nuages de points LiDAR 3D)declaredTrajekt Sports (lanceurs robotisés, Major League Baseball)declaredRover Robotics (véhicules autonomes robustes)declared
Shifts

  1. Governance Opening

    ADLINK files the Eclipse Cyclone DDS project proposal with the Eclipse Foundation, offering the Vortex OpenSplice 6.8 code base as initial contribution: a vendor product moves under foundation governance.

    Source: Eclipse Foundation (proposition de projet)

  2. First release Neutral

    The public repository eclipse-cyclonedds/cyclonedds is created, four months after the proposal. The first Eclipse release, 0.1.0, follows in 2019.

Sources: GitHub, official eclipse-cyclonedds repository (2026-08-27)Eclipse Foundation (2026-08-27)GitHub, official repository (creation date) (2026-08-27)GitHub Releases, official repository (2026-03-20)ROS 2 documentation (official repository) (2026-08-27)Eclipse Foundation Newsletter (article ADLINK) (2021-01-01)Eclipse Foundation (proposition de projet) (2017-09-05) Last verified 2026-10-10

Fast DDS is the default middleware vendor of ROS 2 : the transport most robots running ROS 2 use without ever choosing it. It implements the OMG DDS 1.4 and RTPS 2.2 standards in C++.

Governance : Entreprise unique (eProsima, PME espagnole fondée en 2004), qui dirige seule le développement ; une offre commerciale distincte, Fast DDS Pro, coexiste avec la version open source.Current version : 3.6.2 (2 juillet 2026, version open source)Used by : Écosystème ROS 2 (fournisseur RMW par défaut)declaredKUKA (automatisation industrielle)declaredClearpath RoboticsdeclarediRobot (robotique grand public)declaredRapyuta Robotics (robotique en nuage)declaredROBOTIS (servomoteurs DYNAMIXEL)declared
Shifts

  1. Component Neutral

    eProsima publishes Fast DDS 2.0.0, which adds the API layer compliant with the OMG DDS standard and deprecates the former Fast RTPS API. The project takes the name Fast DDS on that occasion.

    Source: GitHub Releases, official eProsima/Fast-DDS repository

Sources: GitHub, official eProsima repository (2026-08-27)eProsima (2026-08-27)GitHub Releases, official repository (2026-07-02)eProsima (2026-08-27)ROS 2 documentation (official repository) (2026-08-27)GitHub Releases, official eProsima/Fast-DDS repository (2020-06-01) Last verified 2026-10-10

Zenoh combines publish-subscribe, query and storage in one protocol, and targets links that DDS handles poorly: constrained devices, lossy networks, robot-to-cloud. It can replace DDS under ROS 2 through rmw_zenoh.

Governance : Committers de l'Eclipse Foundation (projet en incubation) ; ZettaScale Technology en est le principal contributeur et l'éditeur commercial.Current version : 1.10.0 (14 août 2026)Used by : TurtleBot 4 (plateforme robot mobile ROS 2)declaredTractonomy Robotics (robots logistiques autonomes)declaredDragonBot (diffusion de données capteurs en périphérie)declared
Shifts

  1. First release Neutral

    The current official repository eclipse-zenoh/zenoh is created; a same-named predecessor at ADLINK dates back to 2017, with no sourced proof of code continuity.

Sources: GitHub, official repository (SPDX header) (2026-08-27)Eclipse Foundation (2026-08-27)GitHub, official repository (creation, first tags) (2026-08-27)GitHub Releases, official repository (2026-08-14)GitHub, official ros2/rmw_zenoh repository (2026-08-27)Eclipse Zenoh (official project site) (2026-08-27) Last verified 2026-10-11

LiveKit is the open-source WebRTC stack behind ChatGPT's voice mode, and since 2026 it has extended into robotics: Portal and ROS Portal, two Apache-2.0 packages for teleoperation, data recording and remote policy inference. Both repositories were created in April 2026 and the ROS 2 bridge is still a release candidate (v1.0.0-rc3, August 2026) with a handful of GitHub stars : the code is real and installable, but adoption is not yet there. Note the tension in its own positioning: the Portal announcement frames it as an alternative to ROS and DDS, while the robotics documentation presents a gateway towards ROS.

Governance : Société privée qui décide seule de la feuille de route du code open source et du service Cloud payant ; aucune fondation neutre.Current version : 1.13.6 (26 août 2026, serveur)Used by : SkydiodeclaredPolymath Roboticsdeclared
Shifts

  1. Component Opening

    The robotics repositories livekit/portal and livekit/ros-portal are created under Apache-2.0 : the robotics offering is published code, not only a positioning page.

  2. Component Neutral

    The ROS 2 bridge reaches v1.0.0-rc3: still a release candidate, with a handful of GitHub stars.

Sources: GitHub, official LiveKit repository (2026-08-27)GitHub, official LiveKit repository (2026-08-27)GitHub, official LiveKit repository (2026-08-27)LiveKit, Inc. (official blog) (2026-06-10)LiveKit, Inc. (official documentation) (2026-08-27)LiveKit, Inc. (official site) (2026-08-27)LiveKit, Inc. (official site) (2026-08-27)LiveKit, Inc. (official site) (2026-08-27)LiveKit, Inc. (official blog) (2021-07-07)LiveKit, Inc. (official legal document) (2026-08-27) Last verified 2026-10-11

WebRTC is the open standard for peer-to-peer realtime audio, video and data, jointly specified by the W3C and the IETF. In robotics it has become the workhorse of teleoperation : the transport layer underneath products such as LiveKit. It has no SPDX licence and no single country of origin: it is a specification, not a piece of software.

Governance : Le W3C rédige l'API navigateur sous engagement de brevets libres de redevance ; l'IETF normalise les protocoles réseau (RFC 8825 et suivantes). Aucune entreprise ni organisation unique ne contrôle la spécification.Current version : Recommandation W3C du 13 mars 2025 (première Recommandation : 26 janvier 2021)Used by : Transitive Roboticsthird party
Shifts

  1. First release Opening

    Google open-sources the voice and video engines acquired with GIPS, under a royalty-free BSD-style licence. Day left unstated: the project blog dates the post 3 May 2011, the W3C mailing-list announcement lands on 31 May.

  2. Governance Opening

    W3C publishes WebRTC 1.0 as a Recommendation, jointly with the matching IETF protocol standards: the transport of the web becomes an open standard rather than one vendor's code base.

    Source: World Wide Web Consortium (official press release)

Sources: W3C (official specification) (2025-03-13)IETF (official blog) (2026-08-27)IETF Datatracker (RFC 8825) (2026-08-27)W3C (page official) (2026-08-27)Transitive Robotics (page produit official) (2026-08-27)Projet WebRTC (archive official de webrtc.org) (2011-05-03)World Wide Web Consortium (official press release) (2021-01-26) Last verified 2026-10-11

LeRobot is Hugging Face's open-source library for real robots: a hardware-agnostic control interface, a standard dataset format (LeRobotDataset) for recording teleoperated demonstrations, and implementations of imitation-learning and vision-language-action policies such as ACT and SmolVLA. It deliberately sits outside ROS.

Governance : Équipe LeRobot salariée de Hugging Face ; feuille de route décidée en interne, contributions externes par pull request.Current version : 0.6.1 (3 août 2026)Used by : NVIDIAthird party
Shifts

  1. First release Opening

    First public release of the lerobot package, version 0.1.0, on PyPI. The repository huggingface/lerobot had been created on 26 January 2024.

    Source: PyPI (paquet publié par Hugging Face)

Sources: GitHub, official Hugging Face repository (2026-08-27)GitHub, official Hugging Face repository (2026-08-27)Hugging Face (official documentation) (2026-08-27)NVIDIA (official documentation) (2026-08-27)Hugging Face, Inc. (official legal document) (2026-08-27)PyPI (paquet publié par Hugging Face) (2024-03-09) Last verified 2026-10-11

Foxglove is the reference tool for inspecting, debugging and replaying robot data. It matters here as a cautionary tale as much as a tool: it was open source under MPL-2.0 and went closed-source on 11 March 2024. Its file format MCAP stayed open, and became the default rosbag2 format in ROS 2.

Governance : Entreprise unique (société du Delaware, siège à San Francisco) ; aucun comité externe.Current version : 2.53.1Used by : Wayve (conduite autonome)declaredBreaker Industries (orchestration multi-robots air, terre et mer)declared
Shifts

  1. Licence Closing

    Foxglove 2.0 is announced: the application becomes proprietary and its source is no longer published. The MCAP file format stays open under MIT.

    Source: Foxglove Technologies Inc. (official blog)

Sources: Foxglove Technologies Inc. (official blog) (2024-03-11)Foxglove (announcement relayed on Open Robotics Discourse) (2024-03-11)Foxglove Technologies Inc. (official blog) (2026-05-25)Foxglove Technologies Inc. (official legal document) (2026-08-27)Foxglove (official blog) (2021-01-01)Foxglove Technologies Inc. (official documentation) (2026-08-18)Foxglove Technologies Inc. (official documentation) (2026-08-27)Foxglove Technologies Inc. (official site) (2026-08-27)Foxglove Technologies Inc. (official site) (2026-08-27) Last verified 2026-10-06

Rerun logs, visualizes and streams multimodal data (images, point clouds, tensors, time series) for robotics and computer vision. Its dedicated ROS 2 bridge repository was archived in January 2026; ROS 2 use now goes through the documented integration rather than a maintained bridge.

Governance : Entreprise unique (Stockholm) ; bibliothèque cœur publiée en open source, sans fondation ni comité externe documenté.Current version : 0.38.1 (17 septembre 2026)
Shifts

  1. Archived Closing

    The dedicated ROS 2 bridge repository rerun-io/rerun-ros is archived; ROS 2 use now relies on the documented integration rather than a maintained bridge.

    Source: GitHub, official repository rerun-io (archived on 19 January 2026)

Sources: GitHub, official rerun-io repository (2026-08-27)GitHub Releases, official repository (2026-08-26)GitHub, official repository rerun-io (archived on 19 January 2026) (2026-01-19)Rerun (official documentation) (2026-08-27)TechCrunch (trade press, secondary source, acknowledged) (2025-03-20) Last verified 2026-10-06

MCAP is the container format for timestamped, multi-channel robot recordings, independent of the serialization used. It has been the default rosbag2 storage format in ROS 2 since the Iron release, ce qui en fait, in practice, the archive format of the field.

Governance : Détenu par Foxglove Technologies Inc., contributions externes acceptées, sans fondation indépendante, mais maintenu open source explicitement, indépendamment du passage de l'application Foxglove au propriétaire.Current version : mcap-cli 0.3.0 (15 juillet 2026) ; composants versionnés séparément par langageUsed by : Écosystème ROS 2 (format par défaut de rosbag2 depuis Iron)declaredAnduril (systèmes autonomes de défense)declaredWayve (conduite autonome)declaredWaabi (camions autonomes)declaredDexterity (bras robotiques d'entrepôt)declaredNorlab, Université Laval (laboratoire de robotique)declared
Shifts

  1. Licence Opening

    When the Foxglove application goes proprietary, MCAP is explicitly kept open source under MIT : the format outlived the closing of the tool that created it.

Sources: GitHub, official foxglove/mcap repository (2026-08-27)Foxglove Technologies Inc. (official blog) (2022-01-01)GitHub Releases, official repository (2026-07-15)MCAP (official project site) (2026-08-27)Open Robotics Discourse (2026-08-27)Foxglove Technologies Inc. (official blog) (2026-05-25) Last verified 2026-10-06

ROS-Industrial bridges the ROS ecosystem to industrial manipulators and factory automation hardware: drivers, MoveIt configurations, training material, CI tooling. It has no single licence or version number : it is dozens of separately versioned repositories under regional member-funded consortia rather than one company.

Governance : Consortiums régionaux à adhésion payante, pour les Amériques (SwRI depuis 2013), l'Europe (Fraunhofer IPA) et l'Asie-Pacifique (ARTC/NTU), qui orientent la feuille de route par des projets techniques financés par leurs membres ; le code reste publié en open source.
Shifts

  1. First release Opening

    Shaun Edwards, at Southwest Research Institute, creates the ROS-Industrial open-source repository, to bring ROS to industrial robot controllers.

  2. Governance Neutral

    The ROS-Industrial Consortium Americas is launched under Southwest Research Institute: a repository becomes a membership body, funded by its industrial members.

Sources: ROS-Industrial Consortium (official site) (2026-08-27)GitHub, official ROS-Industrial organisation (2026-08-27) Last verified 2026-10-07

11 / 11 entries

Christian Verbrugge

Christian Verbrugge · D·Fairy

Bringing a physical AI solution into European industry?

15 years at KUKA on automotive OEM programs (€100M), now focused on edge AI and autonomous agents. I support robotics and embodied AI companies on their EMEA market entry: OEM and Tier 1 access, co-funded pilots, AI Act readiness.

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