Model Context Protocol (ROS MCP Server)

A bridge that lets large models call ROS robot interfaces through a single, unified protocol.

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open standard Anthropic released in November 2024, defining a common format for how an LLM application calls external tools and data sources. ROS-MCP-Server is a community open-source project that exposes ROS as an MCP tool: it connects to a robot through rosbridge (ROS's WebSocket interface), letting models such as Claude or GPT list topics, read sensor data, publish velocity commands, or call services — all without modifying the robot's existing code, and it supports both ROS 1 and ROS 2. It's well suited to quickly prototyping natural-language robot control, but having a large model issue commands directly lacks real-time guarantees and safety assurances, so it can't substitute for low-level control.

ExampleTelling a large model “move the cart forward one meter” makes it publish a velocity message to the cmd_vel topic via ROS-MCP-Server.

Also called

model context protocol, ros-mcp-server

Related

Large Language Model (LLM) · rosbridge · ROS 2 · LLM-based Task Planning · cmd_vel Topic (geometry_msgs/Twist velocity command)

Sources

Model Context Protocol 官网 (Chinese)
ros-mcp-server GitHub

As of

2026-09