Governance status

Open specification,
single maintainer, for now

RCAN is an open specification maintained by one person. The goal is to hand it to a neutral steward. This page says where that stands, without rounding up.

Where things stand

Maintainers
One: Craig Merry. There is no board, no co-founders, no endorsing organizations and no partners yet.
Verification
No third-party verification of the specification, the conformance suite or any implementation.
Licenses
Specification text CC BY 4.0. Reference SDKs (rcan-py, rcan-ts) MIT. Anyone can implement, fork or audit without permission.
Neutral steward
Not in place. RCAN, with the Robot Registry Foundation registry, was proposed to the AAIF (Linux Foundation) as a Sandbox project. The proposal was declined as too early on 2 October 2026, and the maintainer intends to resubmit once its requirements are met.
Standards
Seeking review and collaboration from standards bodies and testing labs. No standards body has endorsed, adopted or approved RCAN.

AAIF proposal: aaif/project-proposals#43. The physical-assurance requirements and test method are defined vendor-neutrally in Bounded Embodiment; RCAN's Appendix C maps them onto RCAN. Bounded Embodiment was presented remotely in Session 1 (“Core Technologies for Embodied AI”) of the ITU Workshop on “Embodied AI for Multimedia Technologies”, Hangzhou, China, 16 October 2026, held with ITU-T FG-EAI. That was a presentation, not an endorsement. The talk is written up at craigmerry.com/bounded-embodiment. RCAN is one open implementation of these ideas; the property does not depend on it.

Conflicts of interest

The maintainer also builds OpenCastor, an open-source runtime that implements RCAN, and runs the Robot Registry Foundation registry. OpenCastor is one implementation of RCAN, not the reference for it. Protocol changes are proposed and discussed in public on GitHub.

The Robot Registry Foundation is likewise proposed, not incorporated. Its draft charter is at docs.robotregistryfoundation.org/governance.

Conformance is not certification

RCAN defines protocol conformance levels L1–L4. Conformance is self-asserted, and only L1 has an executable live checker today. There is no certification program and no certification badge. Certification requires audit by a qualified third-party body, which is out of scope for this project.

Physical assurance levels BE-1 to BE-3 (Appendix C, informative) are a separate axis from L1–L4. An L3 robot can be BE-1.

How to get involved

Review is the most useful contribution: standards bodies, testing labs, academics and implementers who can check the spec against their own practice.

RobotRegistryFoundation/rcan-spec

Open issues about RCAN, review proposals, and comment on changes.

 RobotRegistryFoundation/bounded-embodiment

Feedback on the physical-assurance requirements or test method goes to its issue forms, not to rcan-spec.
Review and collaboration

Standards bodies and testing labs: contact foundation@opencastor.ai with your affiliation and what you would like to review.

Read the Spec → Conformance Levels About RCAN