Interop SIG, 05 November 2026: Behavior Declarations

Summary

The Next Generation Open-RMF initiative aims to enable modular architectures where users can swap system components like traffic management or task execution. To address the complexity of ensuring compatibility between different module implementations across varied environments (e.g., factory vs. airport), this meeting introduces 'Behavior Declarations.' This concept allows modules to formally declare their capabilities and behaviors via manifest files, helping users validate combinations for specific use cases and enabling the auto-generation of integration and end-to-end test expectations.

Editorial context

This publication reports on a community meeting discussing 'Behavior Declarations' for the Next Generation Open-RMF initiative, a proposed framework to manage modular compatibility and testing expectations across diverse robotic environments.

Source: ROS Discourse — Community updates · Read original article ↗

Article text · Original source · English

Meeting Link

Calendar Link

2026-11-05T15:00:00Z

The Next Generation Open-RMF initiative aims to have a highly modular architecture that will allow users to swap out parts of the system (e.g. Traffic Management, Task Management, Execution, Door Management, Elevator Management) with alternative implementations. This framework is meant to be deployed across many different kinds of environments which may have different kinds of devices and drastically different use cases. As a result, there won’t be a one-size-fits-all set of features or behaviors for the modules. A factory environment may care about high throughput above all else, whereas an airport environment may care about robustness to human presence more than throughput. This can lead to preferring different traffic management algorithms for each environment, and those traffic management systems may have different behaviors, capabilities, and requirements.

This will lead to significant complexity in understanding how to compose an Open-RMF system correctly, because now the user needs to ensure that all the modules they choose to use are compatible and are suitable for their use-case and environment. It also complicates integration and e2e testing since expectations will vary by the choice of module implementations.

This month’s discussion will be about Behavior Declarations, a concept we’re introducing to Next Gen Open-RMF to allow module implementations to declare (e.g. through a manifest file) what their capabilities and behaviors are, in a formal, extensible way. This will help users validate that combinations of module implementations match their intended use cases. Moreover, we will use these declarations to auto-generate and/or configure expectations for integration tests and e2e tests for combinations of module implementations.

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