In a highly competitive economy, efficiency is the key to staying competitive. In manufacturing, efficiency is achieved through intelligent, robust and automated processes and production systems. One way to achieve greater efficiency in production is through the use of robotic systems, particularly six-degree industrial robots. A challenge in integrating such a system is the variability of interfaces for different robot manufacturers and types. In this work, we propose an object-oriented modular open-source software architecture to address the high variability of interfaces, called GRIP (Generic Robot Interface & Platform). The aim is to use existing available hardware- and interface abstractions, create vendor-specific software modules and have a common method to describe the properties of a robot. This work lays the foundation for a vendor-independent implementation of robot skills.