ROS MCP Server 🔌 MCP server Free

What it does

ROS MCP Server is an open-source Model Context Protocol bridge between AI coding agents and robots running ROS (Robot Operating System) or ROS2. It exposes your robot's live topics, services, actions and parameters to an MCP client so an LLM can inspect and control a real or simulated robot in the same session it uses to write and debug code, without you writing custom glue scripts for every integration.

Tools it gives your agent

• Publish and subscribe to ROS topics
• Call ROS services and actions
• Read and set ROS parameters
• Auto-discover available topics, services and actions along with their message types
• Pull real-time sensor data and robot state for the agent to reason over

It supports both ROS 1 and ROS 2 (including Jazzy and Humble), and works over rosbridge, so it sits alongside an existing robot stack instead of requiring changes to it.

Works with

Any MCP-compatible client, including Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor and Codex CLI, plus non-MCP-native assistants like ChatGPT and Gemini CLI via their MCP support.

How to install or connect

pip install ros-mcp-server

Follow the project's installation guide for wiring up rosbridge and pointing your MCP client at the server; exact client configuration depends on which agent you use.

Maintenance and safety

Actively developed, with 400+ commits, dozens of open pull requests and issues, and an Apache-2.0 licence. It does not modify robot source code, reducing the blast radius of a misbehaving agent, but any tool that lets an LLM issue live commands to physical hardware should be run with care - test in simulation first and gate real-hardware actions behind review.

Who should use it

Robotics engineers and hobbyists who already run ROS/ROS2 and want their coding agent to read sensor data, call services or drive a robot directly from a terminal session, instead of switching to a separate robotics IDE.