Romask

Romask is a fictional, open-source middleware framework designed to coordinate real-time modular robotics and simulation systems. It aims to provide deterministic timing, fault isolation, and extensibility through a plugin-based architecture.

The core is event-driven and component-oriented. It supports multiple transport backends including TCP/IP, UDP multicast, and shared memory, and offers bindings for C++, Python, and Rust. Components can run as standalone processes, in containers, or on embedded devices, with a simulation bridge to connect to physics engines.

Romask originated in 2015 from researchers at the Technoia Institute for Robotics. The project released its first public version in 2017, with major updates in 2019 adding a real-time scheduler and a security model, and further improvements in 2021 and 2022.

Key features include real-time deterministic scheduling, modular processing pipelines, fault isolation through component boundaries, secure communication with authentication and TLS, comprehensive logging and traceability, and built-in tooling for testing and simulation.

Applications span academic robotics labs, industrial automation pilots, autonomous vehicle prototyping, and education. Romask is used to orchestrate perception, planning, and actuation stacks across heterogeneous hardware and software components.

The project maintains a small but active community, with periodic online conferences and user groups. It is distributed under an open-source license similar to permissive licenses. Critics note a learning curve and the need for mature enterprise tooling.