InOrbit opens up its robot fleet software so companies can stop rebuilding the same tools from scratch

Key points

• InOrbit.AI released OpenRobOps, a free open-source software foundation for managing fleets of robots, in 2026.
• OpenRobOps is the first reference implementation of ISO 21423, an upcoming international standard governing how industrial robots and fleet managers communicate.
• At Automate 2026, 10 companies publicly demonstrated multi-vendor robot orchestration based on InOrbit technology for the first time.
• The software is distributed under the Apache 2.0 licence, meaning anyone can use, modify and deploy it without paying licensing fees.
• InOrbit's paid product, Space Intelligence, can orchestrate fleets built on OpenRobOps.

Every time a company wants to ship a fleet of autonomous mobile robots, the small wheeled machines that move goods around warehouses and factories, their engineers face the same problem. Before they can work on anything useful, they spend months or years building basic plumbing: databases to store robot data, dashboards to watch the machines, systems to alert humans when something goes wrong. InOrbit.AI calls this the "build trap," and it has now released a free tool designed to get developers out of it.

Founded in 2017 and based in Mountain View, California, InOrbit released OpenRobOps this week. It handles the core operations layer for robot fleets: it ingests telemetry (the stream of status data that robots constantly broadcast), tracks their positions on a map in real time, manages alert rules, and can attempt automatic fixes when a robot behaves unexpectedly. If automatic fixes fail, it escalates the problem to a human operator.

The software works whether a company's computers live on-site, are completely disconnected from the internet (what engineers call an "air-gapped" setup), or run in a cloud service. It also connects natively with Open-RMF, an open standard for coordinating traffic across mixed fleets from different manufacturers.

Why does an ISO standard matter here?

The bigger story, for anyone building or running industrial robots, is that OpenRobOps is the first working example of ISO 21423, an international standard still being finalised that will define exactly how industrial mobile robots and their fleet managers exchange data. Think of it as a common language: once widely adopted, a robot from one manufacturer should be able to report its status to a fleet manager from a completely different company without custom translation software in between.

InOrbit CEO Florian Pestoni sits on the ISO working group developing the standard and represents ANSI, the American national standards body. Ten companies demonstrated multi-vendor orchestration built on this standard at the Automate 2026 trade show, according to The Robot Report, which first covered the release.

Steve Cousins, executive director of the Stanford Robotics Center and a member of InOrbit's board, compared the release to the creation of ROS, the Robot Operating System that standardised low-level robot software in the research world. "When we created ROS, our mission was to give roboticists an open ecosystem so they could stop re-inventing basic device drivers," Cousins said. "OpenRobOps creates the same shift for robot operations and fleet management."

OpenRobOps works with any robot form factor, wheeled or legged. It's distributed under the Apache 2.0 licence, so startups, university researchers and large manufacturers can all use it freely. Our coverage of open-source robotics has so far focused on hardware; this is the first time we've seen the same logic applied to the fleet management layer that sits above the machines.

Companies that want more capability can pay for InOrbit's Space Intelligence platform, which sits on top of the open layer. The foundation is free; advanced orchestration is where InOrbit makes its money.

For warehouse operators and logistics managers, the practical upshot is this: robot vendors who adopt OpenRobOps should be able to deliver fleet management software faster and at lower cost, which should eventually mean fewer half-finished dashboards and more time spent on making robots actually useful.

Common questions

Does OpenRobOps replace the software that comes with my robots?

No. It's a foundation that robot manufacturers and software developers build on top of. End users are unlikely to interact with it directly; the effect shows up in better, more consistent fleet management tools from the vendors they already work with.

Is ISO 21423 a finished standard yet?

Not yet. It's still being finalised by the International Organization for Standardization. OpenRobOps is a reference implementation, meaning a working example of what the standard requires, which gives manufacturers a head start on building compatible products before the standard is formally published.