AXON: A ROS 2 RMW with Shared-Memory/QUIC Transport and QKD/ML-KEM Key Establishment

Robot Operating System 2 (ROS 2) standardizes application code against a middleware interface (RMW) whose reference implementations are built on the Data Distribution Service (DDS). We present AXON, an alternative ROS 2 RMW implementation that separates transport policy by deployment scope. A Rust core and C++ adapter use POSIX shared-memory rings for same-host communication, QUIC for remote communication, and a daemon for discovery and graph synchronization. We then describe two fail-closed TLS 1.3 key-establishment configurations for remote traffic. The classic configuration offers only the hybrid X25519MLKEM768 group, preventing negotiation of a classical-only group. The qkd configuration imports a 256-bit key obtained through the ETSI GS QKD 014 API as a pairwise external PSK and offers no Diffie-Hellman group. Its default messages10 strategy additionally protects remote application messages with AES-256-GCM, rotating KME material after ten outgoing messages and using a fresh nonce per envelope; session relies on QUIC protection alone. The external-PSK path requires a narrow extension to rustls, now bundled with AXON. We define the threat model, distinguish peer authentication in the two configurations, and delimit the implementation-level validation from ROS 2 conformance, comparative performance, and physical-QKD validation.