Robot Context Protocol (RCP): A Runtime-Agnostic Interface for Agent-Aware Robot Control

TL;DR

The paper introduces RCP, a middleware-agnostic communication protocol that simplifies robotic system interactions, supporting diverse environments and enhancing robustness, scalability, and security in multi-agent ecosystems.

Contribution

It presents RCP, a novel, schema-driven, runtime-agnostic protocol that unifies robot communication across various platforms and deployment scenarios.

Findings

Supports seamless robot-user-agent interactions

Ensures robustness and security through strict type validation

Enables deployment in manufacturing, logistics, and healthcare

Abstract

The Robot Context Protocol (RCP) is a lightweight, middleware-agnostic communication protocol designed to simplify the complexity of robotic systems and enable seamless interaction between robots, users, and autonomous agents. RCP provides a unified and semantically meaningful interface that decouples client-facing operations from backend implementations, supporting a wide range of deployment environments including physical robots, cloud-based orchestrators, and simulated platforms. Built on HTTP and WebSocket transport layers, the protocol defines a schema-driven message format with structured operations such as read, write, execute, and subscribe. It integrates features such as runtime introspection, asynchronous feedback, multi-tenant namespace isolation, and strict type validation to ensure robustness, scalability, and security. The architecture, message structure, interface model, and adapter-based backend integration strategy of RCP are described, along with deployment practices and applicability across industries including manufacturing, logistics, and healthcare. RCP enables intelligent, resilient, and safe robotic operations in complex, multi-agent ecosystems.