Introducing OpenRobOps: We're Building an Open Foundation for Robot Operations

Autonomous mobile robots are showing up everywhere — in warehouses, hospitals, airports, sidewalks. The number of deployed robots is growing fast, and so is the complexity of keeping them running. But while the robots themselves have gotten remarkably capable, the way we operate fleets hasn't kept up.

Today, every robot vendor ships its own proprietary operations dashboard. If you run robots from two manufacturers, you get two disconnected views. If you want to customize how you monitor your fleet, you're limited to what the vendor exposes. And if you ever want to switch platforms, you're starting from scratch.

This is a familiar pattern in technology — and one that open source has solved before. Linux gave servers a common foundation. ROS gave robot developers a shared framework. Robot operations deserves the same.

So we're building it. Today we're announcing OpenRobOps, a new open-source project for robot fleet management and operations — and we're building it in the open, from day one.

What we're setting out to build

OpenRobOps won't be just another dashboard. Our goal is a foundation the robotics industry can build on together: an open-source, vendor-agnostic platform for operating fleets of autonomous mobile robots — fully self-hostable, under the Apache 2.0 license.

We're not starting from a blank page. OpenRobOps is rooted in production-proven technology from InOrbit.AI, which has been used to manage thousands of robots in real-world deployments. Our work now is bringing that experience into an open, transparent codebase that anyone can run, inspect, and extend.

Here's what we're aiming for:

One view for any fleet. Real-time telemetry, customizable dashboards, and incident tracking across your robots — regardless of who manufactured them. One platform, one view, any vendor.

Ownership, not rental. Not a SaaS product you rent access to. OpenRobOps will run on your servers, under your control. Your robot data stays where you decide it stays.

Open to every robot. Native support for ROS and ROS 2, integration with Open-RMF, and — as the standard matures — ISO 21423, the emerging interoperability standard for industrial mobile robots. We want joining a fleet to be easy no matter what your robot speaks.

Extensible by design. Pluggable ingest modules for any telemetry, custom widgets for the exact operational view your team needs, and a declarative configuration API so dashboards, attributes, and incidents can be defined as code.

Boring, familiar technology. MQTT with Protocol Buffers on the wire; Node.js, React, and MongoDB behind it. If you've worked in robotics or web development, you'll feel at home.

Where we are today

Early. The core architecture is taking shape, and telemetry is flowing from robots to dashboards. There are rough edges, missing pieces, and open questions — and that's exactly why we're announcing now rather than later.

We believe the best infrastructure is built in the open, with the people who will actually use it. The decisions we make in the coming months — how robots connect, how data is modeled, how the platform is extended — will shape the project for years. We'd rather make them with you.

Follow along, or better: join in

If you're running a fleet of warehouse robots, developing the next generation of AMRs, or just believe that robot operations infrastructure should be transparent and community-driven — there's a place for you here, from the very beginning:

• Star the repo on GitHub — the code is landing there as it opens up
• Join the community on Discussions — tell us about your fleet and what you'd need from a platform like this
• Contribute — the contributing guide explains how to get involved

Robot operations should be open. Let's build it together.

— Hernan & Florian