Introduction

Skills are atomic robot capabilities that the Innate agent chains together to accomplish complex, long-horizon behaviors. Each skill encodes a single capability—moving through the world, manipulating objects, speaking, or reaching an external service like email or an API—that can be combined with others to form coherent action sequences. When the Innate agent receives a request like “check on grandma,” it decomposes this into a skill chain: navigate to bedroom → look around → send picture via email → speak reassurance. Four skills, one coherent behavior.

Two Types of Skills

Skills are defined in one of two ways.

Code-Defined Skills

Code-defined skills are Python classes with explicit logic. The runtime injects declared interfaces, and the Innate agent reads your signature/docstrings to call the skill correctly.

import math
from brain_client.skill_types import Skill, SkillResult, Interface, InterfaceType

class LookAround(Skill):
    mobility = Interface(InterfaceType.MOBILITY)
    head = Interface(InterfaceType.HEAD)

    @property
    def name(self):
        return "look_around"

    def execute(self, num_directions: int = 4):
        """Rotate and scan the environment."""
        if self.mobility is None or self.head is None:
            return "Required interfaces not available", SkillResult.FAILURE

        num_directions = max(1, num_directions)
        self.head.set_position(-15)
        self.mobility.rotate((2 * math.pi) / num_directions)
        return "Scan complete", SkillResult.SUCCESS

    def cancel(self):
        return "Cancelled"

Use this style when you want deterministic physical control, API and web-service calls, explicit sequencing, or custom sensor processing.

Policy-Defined Skills (End-to-End)

Policy-defined skills are learned policies trained from demonstrations. For manipulation, the current workflow uses ACT (Action Chunking with Transformers).

{
  "name": "pick_cup",
  "type": "learned",
  "guidelines": "Use when you need to pick up a cup",
  "execution": {
    "model_type": "act_policy",
    "checkpoint": "policy_step_50000.pth"
  }
}

Use this style when behavior is easier to learn from data than encode by hand, especially for visuomotor manipulation.

Where to Put Your Skills

Your skills go in ~/innate-os/workspace/custom_skills/ on the robot. This is the directory the system scans for your skills — files placed anywhere else will not load. Getting this path right is the single most common stumbling block when a skill “doesn’t appear”.

Code-defined skill → a single Python file: ~/innate-os/workspace/custom_skills/my_skill.py
Policy-defined (physical) skill → a directory with its metadata and checkpoint: ~/innate-os/workspace/custom_skills/my_skill/metadata.json

No registration required. Drop the file in place and it hot-reloads within seconds — the directory is watched while the robot runs, for new files and edits alike.

Skill IDs: `local/` vs `innate-os/`

Skill IDs are namespaced by origin, and agents must use the full ID:

local/<name> — your skills (anything in custom_skills/)
innate-os/<name> — shipped skills (in innate_skills/)

So in an agent, write "local/my_skill", not "my_skill":

def get_skills(self) -> List[str]:
    return [
        "local/my_skill",              # your skill
        "innate-os/navigate_to_position",  # shipped skill
    ]

A bare name without the prefix won’t resolve — this is the second most common reason a skill “doesn’t work” after putting the file in the wrong directory.

Directory	Purpose	Skill ID prefix
`~/innate-os/workspace/custom_skills/`	Your skills (gitignored, survives OS updates)	`local/<name>`
`~/innate-os/workspace/innate_skills/`	Shipped skills (tracked in git, updated by `git pull`)	`innate-os/<name>`

Legacy locations (~/skills/, ~/innate-os/skills/) from releases before the workspace layout are still scanned, and you can add extra directories with extra_skill_dirs under the script_paths section of config/settings.yaml. Skills from any of these also get the local/ prefix — only innate_skills/ produces innate-os/ IDs.

Get Started

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Agent SDK

Hacking on MARS

Manipulation

ROS2 Core

Troubleshooting & Support

Hackathon

Two Types of Skills

Where to Put Your Skills

Skill IDs: `local/` vs `innate-os/`

​Two Types of Skills

​Where to Put Your Skills

​Skill IDs: local/ vs innate-os/

Two Types of Skills

Where to Put Your Skills

Skill IDs: `local/` vs `innate-os/`