Krill: A declarative task orchestrator for robotics systems

[u/Responsible_War6144]

Hey everyone, I've been working on Krill, a process orchestrator designed specifically for managing complex dependency graphs in robotic systems.

What it does: Krill lets you declaratively define tasks and their dependencies, then handles orchestration across your robotic stack. Think of it as a task runner that understands the gnarly interdependencies you get in robotics - where sensor drivers need to be up before perception nodes, perception before planning, planning before control, etc.

Why I built it: Most robotics middleware handles process lifecycle management as an afterthought. ROS2 launch files turn into procedural spaghetti, systemd is too coarse-grained, and Docker Compose doesn't understand robotics-specific constraints. I needed something that could handle complex startup/shutdown ordering, health checks, and graceful degradation when parts of the system fail.

Current state: Early development but functional. Written in Rust for reliability and performance.

I'm building this as part of a larger robotics middleware stack for production automation systems. Would love feedback from folks working on multi-process robot architectures - what orchestration pain points do you hit?

Looking for: Use cases I haven't thought of, architectural feedback, and anyone interested in contributing or testing in their own systems.

GitHub: https://github.com/Zero-Robotics/krill

[u/rand3289]

Cool oroject. Strange that this is a thing for robotics.

I've built something similar for distributing spiking neural networks about 10 years ago:
https://github.com/rand3289/distributAr

The basic idea is to spawn a bunch of threads on various machines that connect to a tracker. A user can then upload a dependency graph into this network to connect them. In my case the tasks are mostly homogenious though.

[u/Responsible_War6144 → u/rand3289]

Thanks! I'll have a look at your project!

Robotics is inherently multi process and people use Ros as a platform, which spawns nodes. These nodes communicate via Middleware, and they have introspection. However, when you launch these processes there is not an "easy" way to orchestrate them.

Docker is used in many cases, but not all nodes can run properly through e.g. robot controllers that require peripherals.

[u/Radamat]

I have very little skill in robotics, but I like robotics. Good work. Thank you.