WEBBOTICS: The Universal Protocol for Autonomous Physical Infrastructure — The Missing API for the Physical World

This paper specifies WEBBOTICS, a universal protocol for autonomous physical infrastructure that introduces a standardized interface for programming, coordinating, and verifying real-world robotic execution. At its core is the Universal Task Language (UTL), a hardware-agnostic schema for describing physical intent, enabling interoperability across heterogeneous robotic systems regardless of manufacturer, embodiment, or operating environment. The architecture is defined as a six-layer protocol stack comprising physical substrate integration, embodiment abstraction, simulation and digital twin validation, AI-driven orchestration, cryptographic verification and economic settlement, and a peer-to-peer collaboration layer (WEBBOTICS Social Extension, WSE). WEBBOTICS enforces predictive execution through mandatory simulation, ensuring tasks meet defined success criteria prior to real-world deployment, while cryptographic attestation mechanisms provide verifiable proof of execution. The protocol integrates decentralized identity via TIP DIDs, enabling secure authorization and sovereign machine identity, and introduces economic primitives that allow physical labor to be programmatically priced, traded, and settled. Nine primary contributions are advanced: (1) the Universal Task Language (UTL); (2) the Embodiment Abstraction Layer; (3) Predictive Execution via simulation validation; (4) the WEBBOTICS Social Extension (WSE) for decentralized robot coordination; (5) the WEBBTRIX Key (WKEY) for portable identity delegation; (6) Executable Physical Capacity (EPC) as a tradable asset class; (7) the WEBBOTICS Haptic Extension (WHE) for sensory telepresence; (8) the Predictive Maintenance Protocol (PMP); and (9) a collective intelligence framework for cross-fleet learning. By introducing a universal, verifiable, and economically programmable interface for physical action, WEBBOTICS establishes the foundational infrastructure required to make physical work as accessible, composable, and scalable as digital information.