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

2026-04-09

AI Summary

This work addresses the limitations of existing Embodied Capability Modules (ECMs), which often function as ad hoc skill bundles lacking stability, composability, and evolvability. To overcome these challenges, the paper introduces ECM Contracts—a contract-based interface model for embodied intelligence that formalizes six dimensions: functional signatures, behavioral assumptions, resource requirements, permission boundaries, recovery semantics, and version compatibility. This is the first effort to integrate a multidimensional contract mechanism into embodied intelligence, thereby unifying capability composition, governance, and evolution. The authors innovatively design version-aware compatibility classes, deprecation rules, and policy-sensitive upgrade checks. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly reduces unsafe or invalid capability compositions while enhancing upgrade safety and rollback readiness.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Embodied AI
• Humans and AI: Human-Aware Planning and Behavior Prediction
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Agent Architectures

Application Category

• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy

Abstract

Embodied agents increasingly rely on modular capabilities that can be installed, upgraded, composed, and governed at runtime. Prior work has introduced embodied capability modules (ECMs) as reusable units of embodied functionality, and recent research has explored their runtime governance and controlled evolution. However, a key systems question remains unresolved: how can ECMs be composed and released as a stable software ecosystem rather than as ad hoc skill bundles? We present ECM Contracts, a contract-based interface model for embodied capability modules. Unlike conventional software interfaces that specify only input and output types, ECM Contracts encode six dimensions essential for embodied execution: functional signature, behavioral assumptions, resource requirements, permission boundaries, recovery semantics, and version compatibility. Based on this model, we introduce a compatibility framework for ECM installation, composition, and upgrade, enabling static and pre-deployment checks for type mismatches, dependency conflicts, policy violations, resource contention, and recovery incompatibilities. We further propose a release discipline for embodied capabilities, including version-aware compatibility classes, deprecation rules, migration constraints, and policy-sensitive upgrade checks. We implement a prototype ECM registry, resolver, and contract checker, and evaluate the approach on modular embodied tasks in a robotics runtime setting. Results show that contract-aware composition substantially reduces unsafe or invalid module combinations, and that contract-guided release checks improve upgrade safety and rollback readiness compared with schema-only or ad hoc baselines. Our findings suggest that stable embodied software ecosystems require more than modular packaging: they require explicit contracts that connect capability composition, governance, and evolution.

Problem

• embodied agents
• capability modules
• software ecosystem
• module composition
• versioning

Innovation

• ECM Contracts
• embodied agents
• contract-based interfaces
• capability composition
• version compatibility