MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — InOrbit has released OpenRobOps, an open-source platform intended to give robot developers and systems integrators a common foundation for monitoring and managing mobile-robot fleets.

The US’s California-based company made ORO software available to the public on September 15, and it's free to use under the Apache License 2.0. OpenRobOps provides a web application for viewing robot locations, telemetry, diagnostics, maps and camera images. It also includes tools for remote control, incident detection and automated recovery actions.

The platform can work on a company's own systems using something called Docker Compose. The people behind it, InOrbit, claim that it's easy for developers to link up different kinds of robots using a common messaging system.
This claim hasn't been thoroughly checked with a wide range of commercial robots InOrbit’s announcement did not identify customers using the newly released open-source version in routine operations or provide comparative performance data.
A central part of the release is its support for ISO 21423, a standard covering communication and interoperability among industrial autonomous mobile robots, fleet managers and other systems in industrial facilities.

InOrbit calls OpenRobOps the first reference implementation of the standard. The project’s ISO 21423 repository says its current work is based on the final draft and cautions that details could change when the standard is published. The repository includes a TypeScript software development kit, documentation and proposed designs for additional tools.

The platform is also compatible with Open-RMF, which is an open-source system that helps manage groups of robots and other building systems. This was made possible with the help of Ekumen, a company that is part of Grid Dynamics, who worked on getting everything integrated.

OpenRobOps could reduce the amount of basic fleet management software that individual robot manufacturers must develop. Its usefulness will depend on compatibility with commercial robots, participation by outside developers and adoption of ISO 21423 after publication.