This article explains how the Robot Operating System (ROS) 2 and Juliet & Romeo® relate to each other, outlining their similarities, differences, and how to decide which to use for specific tasks. When comparing Juliet & Romeo® and ROS 2, the question isn’t which one replaces the other; it’s how they complement each other.
ROS 2 is a very capable, broad, well-established framework with a huge ecosystem. Excellent for research and prototyping for robotics systems needing many sensors, perception, planning, and application-level multi-robot coordination. With correct design and extensive careful configuration, one can get real-time guarantees and low latency on the component level; the scalability and determinism for non-expert users is, however, questionable.
Juliet & Romeo is designed specifically for scalable industrial robotics and automation scenarios. It is suitable for motion + sensor fusion + process logic + AI and more. At the same time it offers safe execution, deterministic motion, low latency guarantees, and consistent behavior as needed for efficiency and scalability. The Juliet community is much younger and offers fewer available components but. Despite this, it already delivers stronger “industrial readiness” in specific settings.
If you have found suitable ROS 2 components that fit your application, the question should not be whether to use one or the other, but how to optimally combine them to accomplish a scalable industrial industry-ready solution that even non-experts can maintain over time.
Do consider that even applications that at first glance do not involve extreme latency requirements, often are dramatically simpler to implement when determinism, reactiveness, and a unified expressive language are given.
Juliet & Romeo
Juliet is a robotics & automation programming language: real-time, multitasking, with safe execution features and automatic memory management.
Romeo is a real-time virtual machine/runtime that executes Juliet (and any bytecode conforming to its format), designed for deterministic behavior, low latency, responsive to events, sensor feedback, etc.
The goal of Juliet & Romeo is to unify motion control, process logic, sensor handling, AI, UI, etc. in one expressive language/runtime stack; to reduce development overhead, improve consistency, help scale automation systems and make them easier to evolve.
ROS 2
ROS 2 is an open-source robotics middleware/framework: modular, component-based, facilitating communication between distributed nodes, sensor integration, planning, control, etc. It’s widely used for robotics research and increasingly in production.
Key features include: DDS (Data Distribution Service) for inter-node communication, support for QoS (Quality of Service) policies, real-time capabilities on component level, cross-platform support, a large ecosystem of packages, tools, and community.
From the description above, it should be easy to understand that there is no competition between the two technologies. ROS 2 is a middleware, and Juliet & Romeo are a real-time development platform. ROS 2 components can easily be developed in Juliet, and you could also implement the instrumentation part of ROS 2 in Juliet and have it running on Romeo. In a similar manner, Juliet implemented applications can use/include ROS 2 components to benefit from the available ecosystem.
For deeper technical insights, the following articles explore how Juliet & Romeo® relates to key automation ecosystems and standards:
Juliet & Romeo® and ROS 2 (link): How Cognibotics’ real-time platform complements the open-source robotics framework.
Juliet & Romeo® and IEC 61131 (link): How modern deterministic automation extends traditional PLC programming environments.
Juliet & Romeo® and SRCI (link): Understanding how standardized PLC-to-robot interfaces align with Cognibotics’ real-time approach.
Julliet & Romeo® Coexisting with Robotics and Automation Ecosystem (link): By coexisting with IEC 61131 PLCs, SRCI, and ROS, it supports modernization where ROI is clear, without disrupting what already works.
