OpenRoIS: A Community-Driven Open-Source Middleware Implementing the Robotic Interaction Service (RoIS) Framework for Physical Robots and Virtual Agents
Service applications for human-robot interaction are commonly written against the hardware-specific interfaces of one platform, so a change of hardware forces a rewrite of the application. The Robotic Interaction Service (RoIS) Framework 2.0, standardized by the Object Management Group (OMG), addresses this fragmentation by defining a platform-independent model in which Service Applications interact with Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) Engines through standardized interfaces and hardware-independent symbolic messages. A specification alone, however, does not provide the maintained implementation, Software Development Kits (SDKs), and adapters needed for practical adoption. This paper presents OpenRoIS, a community-driven open-source middleware providing a concrete implementation of the RoIS Framework 2.0. It takes the position that an openly developed, paradigm-neutral implementation is what carries the standard from specification to practice. OpenRoIS contributes a recursive engine architecture in which a single engine class realizes the main and sub HRI Engine roles, an internal five-method component contract distinct from the five external RoIS interfaces, a mapping of those interfaces onto JSON-RPC 2.0 over WebSocket, a single-source-of-truth type pipeline that generates three consistent language stacks, TypeScript and C# client SDKs that include web and Unity support, and a Python adapter SDK that includes ROS 2 support. Through the common RoIS interfaces, a Service Application can address physical robots and virtual agents over the internet. All source code, interface types, and documentation are released under the Apache-2.0 license and openly developed at https://openrois.org/.