# ECM Contracts: Contract-Aware, Versioned, and Governable Capability Interfaces for Embodied Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.13097 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13097/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [End-to-End Training of Deep Visuomotor Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00702/) (2015)
- [Learning Dexterous In-Hand Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00177/) (2018)
- [Robot Operating System 2: Design, Architecture, and Uses In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07752/) (2022)
- [Behavior Trees in Robotics and AI: An Introduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.00084/) (2017)
- [CoSTAR: Instructing Collaborative Robots with Behavior Trees and Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06145/) (2016)
- [Towards a Framework for Certification of Reliable Autonomous Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.09124/) (2020)
- [Behavior Trees and State Machines in Robotics Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04211/) (2022)
- [Harnessing Embodied Agents: Runtime Governance for Policy-Constrained Execution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07833/) (2026)
- [SROS2: Usable Cyber Security Tools for ROS 2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02615/) (2022)
- [Evolving Skill Modules under a Fixed Planner: Versioning, Rollback, and Runtime Governance for Long-Lived Robot Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07799/) (2026)
- [A Compositional Approach to Verifying Modular Robotic Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05507/) (2022)
- [ROBUST: 221 Bugs in the Robot Operating System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03629/) (2024)
- [Runtime Verification and Field-based Testing for ROS-based Robotic Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11498/) (2024)
- [PHYSFRAME: Type Checking Physical Frames of Reference for Robotic Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11266/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [EmbodiedGovBench: A Benchmark for Governance, Recovery, and Upgrade Safety in Embodied Agent Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11174/) (2026)
- [Federated Single-Agent Robotics: Multi-Robot Coordination Without Intra-Robot Multi-Agent Fragmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11028/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Embodied agents increasingly rely on modular capabilities that are installed, upgraded, composed, and governed at runtime, yet the interfaces between these modules are specified only at the level of message types, so integration failures surface only during execution. We present ECM Contracts, a contract-based interface model for embodied capability modules. Unlike conventional interfaces that specify only input and output types, ECM Contracts encode six dimensions of embodied execution: functional signature, behavioral assumptions, resource requirements, permission boundaries, recovery semantics, and version compatibility. On this model we build a compatibility framework that checks installation, composition, and upgrade before deployment, and a release discipline of version-aware compatibility classes and upgrade gates. We evaluate the prototype by predicting real, independently documented integration failures in the ROS ecosystem: contracts are reconstructed blind from each module's published interface, scored by a checker frozen before reconstruction against bugs from third-party datasets, and confirmed in live runtime execution. Contract checking predicts 56% and 72% of these documented failures across two substrates, against at most 17% for the strongest type and quality-of-service baselines, with the advantage statistically significant and zero false positives on matched-good controls. The resource and version dimensions carry most of this margin; the behavioral dimension adds little beyond the middleware's quality-of-service check, and we report the permission and recovery dimensions as forward-looking. Stable embodied software ecosystems require not just modular packaging but explicit contracts connecting composition, governance, and evolution.