ROS News for March 2nd, 2026
This week we released the ROSCon Global 2026 artwork as well as our diversity scholarships. We also announced a new regional ROSCon in Belgium. On the meetup front we added events in Mountain View, Nigeria, Krakow, and Medellin along with a laundry list of other events (see the full list below).
The Intrinsic AI for Industry Challenge kicked off this week with a series of meetings
along with an open source Toolkit for simulating your workcell. Even if you are not competing there are some real gems in the toolkit, so it is worth checking out.
Jasmeet Singh has a couple of great tutorials on Gazebo system plugins that are must for anyone building a custom simulation environment (Part 1: Introduction, Part 2: Making an LED Plugin).
The ROS Controls team has a PR in review to add an Open Duck Mini ONNX locomotion demo to ROS Control. The model is trained using the MuJoCo simulator.
In other PR news. a PR for a New inflation layer with optional OpenMP acceleration for Nav2 is now in review. It looks like it really improves Nav2 performance for hardware that supports OpenMP.
Anyone and everyone should feel empowered to send any OSRA project a PR! Don’t let those cool new features and improvements languish in a fork.
Events
- 2026-03-08 Call for Papers: RoSE’26 (Robotics Software Engineering) @ ICRA Vienna
- 2026-03-10 => 2026-03-12 ROS-I Consortium Americas Training Event
- 2026-03-10 Scaling Physical AI Meetup Tokyo
- 2026-03-12 7th ROS Meetup Barcelona
- 2026-03-18 Interoperability Framework: Working Group Formation
- 2026-03-18 ROS By-the-Bay NVIDIA GTC Special Edition
- 2026-03-20 ROS Meetup Moscow 2026. Remote participation is possible
- 2026-03-20 HACK2026 ETH Zurich Robot Hackathon
- 2026-03-22 ROSCon Global 2026 Diversity Scholarships Due
- 2026-03-23 ROS Heilbronn Meetup at Bildungscampus
- 2026-03-28 ROS Naija Meetup Nigeria
- 2026-03-30 Odense Robotics and Entrepreneurship Summer School Application Due
- 2026-03-30 ROSCon Croatia
- 2026-03-30 Cracow Robotics & AI Meetup
- 2026-04-14 ROS Meetup Malmö Sweden
- 2026-04-17 Intrinsic AI for Industry Challenge Deadline – More details
- 2026-04-29 => 2026-04-30 ROS Meetup MedellĂn Colombia
- 2026-05-03 Robotics Meetup Bremen
- 2026-05-04 => 2026-05-08 SPACERAISE Space Robotics Summer School
- 2026-05-17 ROBORACER @ ICRA 2026
- 2026-05-22 Stanford Robotics Drone Hackathon
- 2026-05-23 => 2026-05-24 Open Hardware Summit 2026 in Berlin
- 2026-05-23 Open Hardware Summit at TU Berlin
- 2026-06-21 => 2026-06-26 RPL Summer school in robotics, perception and learning, Stockholm, Sweden.
- 2026-06-22 => 2026-06-25 ROSCon France in Paris
- 2026-07-02 Robot Fringe Festival 2026
- 2026-07-17 Open Sauce Technology & Creator Festival – We’re putting together a booth with OpenCV and OSHWA, if you want to demo your ROS robot, reach out.
- 2026-07-29 => 2026-08-04 IEEE RAS Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems in Prague
- 2026-08-05 => 2026-08-06 ROSCon JP 2026
- 2026-08-02 Montreal Robotics Summer School
- 2026-09-22 => 2026-09-24 Global ROSCon 2026 in Toronto
- 2026-11-25 ROSCon Belgium 2026
News
ROSCon Global 2026 Logo + Diversity Scholarships - Gazebo PMC Meeting Minutes 2026-03-02
- ROS PMC Minutes for March 3, 2026
- 6 lessons I learned watching a robotics startup die from the inside
- Artificial Muscles, Boston Dynamics, and More Videos
- Why China’s humanoid robot industry is winning the early market
- 11 women shaping the future of robotics
- Vicarious Surgical faces NYSE delisting again
- 2026 Maritime CWG Pulse Survey
- Dermalogica Deploys Corvus One at Global Distribution Center
- Weekly Robotics #350
- JdeRobot GSoC 2026
ROS
- Kick Off Sessions: AI for Industry Challenge
- The AI for Industry Challenge Toolkit is LIVE!
- Is there a working group for maintaining ROS 2-based robots in industry?
- ROS 2 Servo Control Panel with Python GUI and RViz Visualization
- Groot1Publisher: Visualize and Monitor BehaviorTree v4 trees in Groot 1
- Looking for a good outdoor camera for ROS 2 robot without ribbon cables
- How do people in industry handle updating a 3D pointcloud map?
- Interop SIG Industrial Use-Case for the Crossflow Executor
- Rover + LiDAR perception inside a Forest3D-generated world
- Intra-Process Communications for all clients
- Carto, a small Zenoh debugging tool we built internally
- Design discussion: “discoverable not serviceable” ROS interfaces for lifecycle nodes
- SIPA: Quantifying Physical Integrity and the Sim-to-Real Gap in 7-DoF Trajectories
- Controlling the Nero Robotic Arm with OpenClaw
- MAHE Mobility Challenge 2026
- DART upgraded from 6.13 to 6.16.6 in Linux Gazebo Jetty
- SO-ARM-Moce: An Improved Open-Source Educational Robotic Arm
- LinkForge v1.3.0 — The Linter & Bridge for Robotics
- Roadmap for ROS 2 Based Autonomous USV with EKF and Choquet Integral
- New version of ROS 2 testing framework
- Announcing Gazebo Open Container Images (docker compatible) for All Releases
- Gazebo Fuel Model Feedback
- NopSCADlib: Library of parts modelled in OpenSCAD and a framework for making projects
- Gazebo System Plugins for Beginners - Part 1: Introduction
- Gazebo System Plugins for Beginners - Part 2: Making an LED Plugin
- ros2-skill: Local agent skill for ROS 2 robot control
- Event-Aided Sharp Radiance Field Reconstruction for Fast-Flying Drones
- rosbag_viewer: Yet another standalone ROS1 bag file viewer built with Rust and React
- I built 5 robot arms! Here’s everything that went wrong (Video)
- Simulations of MBARI’s Vehicles in an Underwater World. Using Stonefish and Gazebo
- VGG-TÂł
- MetricNet: Recovering Metric Scale in Generative Navigation Policies
- Open Duck Mini ONNX locomotion demo in ROS Control
- New inflation layer with optional OpenMP acceleration
- Autoware_Vision_Pilot Models
- Inverse Kinematics Demystified: Making Robots Move in Any Direction(Video)
- ROS 2 going industrial (Video)
- ROS 2 Migration Paths, Pitfalls, and Why its Urgent
Jobs
Got a Minute? 
- Help Wanted in gazebosim/gz-sim Create reliable integration tests for verifying GUI plugins
- Help Wanted in gazebosim/gz-sim Feature Request: Add SwerveDrive system plugin