ROS-Industrial team uses Crossflow to scale complex robotics workflows

The Open Robotics Interoperability Special Interest Group (SIG) will host a key presentation on March 5, 2026, where Dillon Chew from the ROS-Industrial Consortium Asia-Pacific will detail his team's successful industrial application of the Crossflow Executor. Originally developed for the Open-RMF (Robotics Middleware Framework) project to orchestrate complex multi-agent interactions, Crossflow is a general-purpose reactive programming library capable of executing graphical workflows. Chew's team, which traditionally relied on Behavior Trees to manage event and dependency-driven robotics processes, turned to Crossflow after encountering significant scalability challenges as their workflows grew in complexity. This presentation will mark a notable case study in the evolution of robotic task orchestration, moving beyond established paradigms.

Chew's experiment represents a tangible validation of Crossflow's utility outside its original RMF context, demonstrating its adaptability to general industrial automation. The team will compare their new Crossflow-based system directly against their previous Behavior Tree implementation, highlighting specific performance and complexity management improvements. This shift signals a broader industry trend towards more flexible, graph-based workflow execution for managing intricate, multi-step robotic processes in manufacturing and logistics. The findings could influence future development within the ROS-Industrial ecosystem and provide a blueprint for other teams facing similar scalability walls with traditional robotic behavior modeling techniques.