The Open Robot Communication (ORC) Framework is a middleware library written in C++, with APIs in Python and C++. ORC is built on top of zeroMQ and it is designed for low-latency message exchange. It was developed at the Volkswagen Machine Learning Research Lab. ORC is currently running through an internal process determining the licensing format prior to release.
If you are interested in further details and performance comparisons to ROS, have a look at our paper published at the IEEE Conference on Robotic Computing (IRC) 2019:
Felix Frank, Alexandros Paraschos, Patrick van der Smagt
ORC—a lightweight, lightning-fast middleware
DOI 10.1109/IRC.2019.00061
The paper should be available online shortly.
If you are interested in ORC, please send a short e-mail to felix.frank@argmax.ai. We will make sure to update you as soon as the current state changes.