Multi-vendor AMR fleets in warehouses cannot interoperate because VDA 5050 and MassRobotics standards cover different concerns and neither solves unified path coordination across robot brands

Warehouse operators deploying AMRs from multiple vendors (e.g., MiR for transport, Locus for picking, OTTO for heavy pallets) face a fragmented interoperability landscape where the two leading standards -- VDA 5050 (European, focused on fleet-manager-to-robot control commands) and MassRobotics Interoperability Standard (North American, focused on robot-to-infrastructure status monitoring) -- address different layers of the problem and neither provides a unified multi-vendor path coordination protocol. Each vendor's robots maintain separate maps, separate path planners, and separate traffic rules, forcing warehouse operators to either accept siloed robot fleets that cannot share aisle space or invest in expensive custom integration middleware. Why it matters: large warehouses increasingly need specialized robots from different vendors for different tasks (goods-to-person, pallet transport, inventory scanning), so operators must deploy multi-vendor fleets, so without interoperability these fleets require separate floor zones and cannot share aisles or intersections, so warehouses waste 15-30% of floor space on segregated robot lanes, so the promised density and flexibility gains of AMR automation are negated by the fragmentation tax, so warehouse operators delay multi-vendor deployments and lock into single-vendor ecosystems with inferior best-of-breed capabilities. The structural root cause is that fleet management involves tightly coupled concerns (map representation, path planning, traffic arbitration, task allocation) that span multiple layers of abstraction, and standardizing only the communication protocol (VDA 5050) or only the monitoring telemetry (MassRobotics) leaves the hardest problem -- real-time coordinated path planning across robots with different kinematic models, different sensor suites, and different safety envelopes -- unsolved, because each vendor considers their path planner to be proprietary competitive advantage and resists delegating it to a shared fleet manager.