Robot Context Protocol (RCP): A Runtime-Agnostic Interface for Agent-Aware Robot Control
This work addresses the problem of fragmented and complex robotic control interfaces for developers and industries like manufacturing, logistics, and healthcare, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing communication paradigms.
The paper tackles the complexity of robotic systems by introducing the Robot Context Protocol (RCP), a lightweight, middleware-agnostic communication protocol that simplifies interactions between robots, users, and agents, enabling seamless deployment across physical, cloud, and simulated environments.
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.