HORO gives every robot, device, and person in your home a verified identity, auditable permissions, and a tamper-proof record — so autonomy never comes at the cost of accountability.
The Problem
Smart home standards like Matter were built for human-operated devices. Robot platforms like ROS 2 were built for research labs. Neither was built for a world where a cleaning robot, a delivery drone, and your front door lock must make real-time trust decisions together.
Great for humans controlling lights. Zero concept of robot actors or autonomous tasks.
Powerful for motion planning. No native identity model or home permission system.
Mandatory audit trails and accountability for autonomous systems. No existing solution covers the home.
Who authorized the robot to enter the bedroom? No vendor today can answer that question.
The Platform
HORO is a Rust-native middleware layer that runs on-premise in your home or building. No cloud dependency. No vendor lock-in.
Every actor — robot, device, person, or third-party service — gets a decentralised identifier (DID) and verifiable credentials. Cryptographically signed. Offline-first.
did:key · Ed25519 · VCsAttribute-based access control with time-limited capability tokens, per-room rules, and human-in-the-loop approval flows. Works in <1 ms without any network call.
ABAC · Capability Tokens · OPA-readyEvery permission grant, denial, and action is written to an append-only Merkle-tree log. Tamper-evident. Exportable. Ready for regulatory review on demand.
Merkle-tree · Anomaly detectionTask state machines with resource locking ensure two robots never conflict over a shared space. Emergency Stop broadcasts to all connected devices in milliseconds.
State machine · Emergency StopWho It's For
HORO serves the full ecosystem — from the engineers shipping the hardware to the bodies writing the rules.
Integrate HORO's SDK once and inherit identity, permissions, and audit trails across every deployment — without rebuilding them per customer.
Your Matter and Home Assistant integrations are human-centric. HORO extends them to cover autonomous actors — without breaking anything you've already built.
HORO is designed from the ground up to make the EU AI Act and Machinery Regulation 2027 tractable for the residential and light-commercial market.
From August 2026, high-risk autonomous systems in the EU must demonstrate traceability, human oversight, and transparency. HORO makes those obligations addressable at the middleware layer — before your product ships, not after.
Open Source
HORO is Apache 2.0 licensed and written in Rust for memory safety and sub-millisecond performance on the permission-critical path. The codebase is structured for auditability — not obfuscation.
# Pre-built HORO policy templates # Drop-in rules for common scenarios package horo.defaults # Delivery robot: 10 min, entrance only delivery_window[actor_id] { actor := data.actors[actor_id] actor.role == "delivery" actor.zone == "entrance" time.now_ns() < actor.expires_at } # Cleaning robot: 2 h, no bedrooms cleaning_allowed { input.role == "cleaning" input.room != "bedroom" input.duration_mins <= 120 } # Guest: 4 h, common areas only guest_access { input.role == "guest" input.area == "common" input.duration_hrs <= 4 }
Early Access
We're opening early access to a select group of robot manufacturers, smart home suppliers, and regulatory partners. Join the waitlist.