Intense efforts have been carried out in the last decades to de ne and implement frameworks to ease the development of robotic applications. This led each research group to propose their own solution, well suited for their needs, however no common framework has been adopted. But today we have the feeling that a peculiar framework has some of the qualities required to meet with general acceptance as far robotics research is concerned : the open source robotics platform ROS developed by Willow Garage. At INRIA Rhône-Alpes, we are such a research group that developed its own framework, Hugr. In this paper, we present the requirements that ruled its design and how we now envision migrating to ROS.