PlaceAuth Foundation

Open infrastructure for interoperability between autonomous systems and physical environments.

PlaceAuth Foundation, Inc. is a Florida nonprofit corporation established to steward PlaceAuth and the Spatial Policy Protocol (SPP).

The Foundation supports open protocol development, interoperability research, reference implementations, security and conformance work, technical education, public peer review, and long-term governance of the PlaceAuth ecosystem.

• PlaceAuth is the project and public technical initiative.
• Spatial Policy Protocol (SPP) is the interoperability protocol.
• PlaceAuth Foundation, Inc. is the legal stewardship organization.

PlaceAuth is an independent project. Experimental integrations or research involving Open-RMF, ROS 2, Nav2, or other external technologies do not imply affiliation with, endorsement by, or adoption by those projects or organizations.

Formation as a Florida nonprofit corporation does not itself constitute federal recognition as a tax-exempt organization.

PlaceAuth develops the Spatial Policy Protocol (SPP): an experimental, vendor-neutral interoperability layer for place-defined operating requirements, autonomous-system conformance, and evidence-backed operating profiles.

The place defines the requirements.
The machine demonstrates conformance.
SPP establishes the operating profile.

PLACE REQUIREMENTS
        →
CONFORMANCE PLAN
        →
EVIDENCE
        →
ADMISSION PROFILE
        →
PHYSICAL OPERATION

v0.3.0 Experimental Preview is the current public project and reference-implementation release.

• Reference implementation: 0.3.0
• Normative protocol specification: SPP 0.1
• Place Package: 0.1 · Explain trace: 0.1
• Dependency-free reference suite: 255 passed, 5 skipped

SPP remains experimental and pre-standardization. It is not an industry standard or a production safety platform.

• place-defined operating requirements
• evidence-based admission, sufficiency assessment, and admission-time revalidation
• signed evidence issuers and signed place-policy authorities with distinct local Ed25519 trust roles
• versioned requirement vocabulary, canonical units, hardened Place Package 0.1, and deterministic provider contracts
• selective requalification and VALID / REVALIDATE / REQUALIFY / INVALID profile lifecycle assessment
• embodiment-specific conformance mapping and independent implementation guidance
• schema-defined deterministic decision traces with spp-explain
• ROS 2/Nav2 runtime validation and live Open-RMF task-eligibility validation
• a bounded facility-side access-control decision boundary

Nav2 runtime behavior. SPP demonstrated an evidence-backed operating profile changing navigation speed behavior of a running Nav2 robot from 1.0 m/s → 0.5 m/s under one active FollowPath goal. The bounded validation exercised ROS 2 Humble, nav2_msgs/msg/SpeedLimit, Nav2 ControllerServer, and stock Regulated Pure Pursuit. It is not a physical safety, stopping, or certification claim.

Open-RMF runtime task gating. SPP task eligibility was validated through a live ROS 2 Humble FleetUpdateHandle.consider_delivery_requests path using RMF fleet adapter Python 2.1.8, a real Adapter, a real FleetUpdateHandle, one stationary registered test robot, and real delivery bids. ADMITTED produced a bid proposal; DENIED produced no proposal with admission_denied; DEGRADED was not runtime-tested. This is not a physical dispatch, traffic-negotiation, fleet-wide, or motion claim.

Facility-side decision boundary. A generic reference adapter maps an AdmissionProfile to an exact-place access decision: matching-place ADMITTED may grant, DEGRADED grants only when every restriction is explicitly accepted, and denied, wrong-place, stale, revoked, or invalid profiles fail closed. It does not validate physical doors, BACnet, MQTT, vendor systems, or physical security.

Critical technical feedback on protocol design, deployment assumptions, trust boundaries, interoperability, security, and overlapping systems is welcome through the technical peer-review entry point.

General inquiries
hello@placeauth.org

Standards & interoperability
standards@placeauth.org

Security
security@placeauth.org

_{Certain technologies described by PlaceAuth are patent pending.}