ROS News for the Week August 3rd, 2026
Congratulations to our Japanese colleagues on another successful ROSConJP. The photos and videos coming out of the event look amazing.
We’ve got a ton of great events coming up. Next Thursday we’ve schedule a ROS By-The-Bay meetup at InOrbit in Mountain View. Foxglove’s Actuate conference is the following week followed by a workshop for the Scenic project at UC Santa Cruz. I’ve also organized a ROS Industry Night at Trossen Robotics showroom in San Francisco’s Mission District
It seems like space robotics was a hot topic this week. ROSConJP attendees got a tour of JAXA, the Japanese Space Agency. Meanwhile, a few of us former Open Robotics folks were part of a site visit to the Intelligent Robotics Group at NASA Ames (the test bed rover on the right runs ROS 2 Jazzy). Our colleagues at Picknik had a webinar with Rocket Lab. The NASA Fly Foundation Robotics Mission is still taking applications and we’re hearing rumors a bigger space robotics competition in the works for 2027.
Check out OpenMantaClaus, an open source low-cost ROS 2-based AUV.
One of the more interesting things coming out of ROSCon Japan this week is Robot System Quest which is a series of games and lessons for learning ROS 2.
Events
- 2026-08-11 August ROS-Industrial Developers Meeting EU
- 2026-08-13 ROS By-The-Bay @ InOrbit
- 2026-08-18 → 2026-08-19 Foxglove Actuate 26
- 2026-08-20 => 2026-08-21 Scenic Workshop August 20-21 @ UC Santa Cruz
- 2026-08-25 Trossen X ROS Industry Night
- 2026-08-26 → 2026-08-27 Ruggedize Agricultural Technology & Robotics Conference
- 2026-09-04 Open Ocean Software Community Day UK
- 2026-09-06 Roboracer VTC 2026
- 2026-09-17 ROS Meetup Barcelona 8th Edition
- 2026-11-05 International Conference on Humanoid Robotics, Innovation & Leadership
ROSCons
- 2026-09-22 => 2026-09-24 Global ROSCon 2026 in Toronto - Three weeks remain for regular tickets.
- 2026-10-21 => 2026-10-23 ROSCon UK in Edinburg - registration now open
- 2026-10-23 => 2026-10-26 ROScon Singapore - applications open
- 2026-10-27 => 2026-10-28 ROSCon Spain in Valencia - reg open!
- 2026-11-03 ROSCon Italy in Bologna
- 2026-11-25 => 2026-11-26 ROSCon Belgium in Nivelles - reg is open!
- 2026-12-03 => 2026-12-04 ROScon Turkey in Istanbul - CFP opens soon
News
- Last day to purchase regular price ROSCon Global tickets is Monday, August 24th
- This Week at Open Robotics Headquarters (2026-07-27)
- Call for Competitions - 2026 IEEE-RAS 25th International Conference on Humanoid Robots
- Dexory CEO Andrei Danescu, “The Market Does Not Want More Robots” (Video)
- FCC Covered List Bans New Foreign Mobile Robots in US
- Laser Power Hack Could Keep Drones Aloft Longer
- Why Walden’s Humanoid Robots Run on Wheels, Not Hype
- Avnet and Weston Robot partner to launch edge AI inspection platform
- Humanoids won’t scale on factory floors until costs drop
- HEBI Robotics earns NASA SBIR grant to fast track miniaturized actuators
- Google DeepMind says Gemini Robotics 2 enables full body control
ROS
OpenMantaClaus - Open source low-cost ROS 2-based AUV for SAUVC- ros2top – Top but for ROS
- MIGHTY: Hermite spline-based real-time trajectory planner for single- and multi-agent UAVs and ground robots – Paper – Video
- Sarcastic Rubik’s Cube Solving Robot
- Robot System Quest: Games and Lessons : Learn ROS 2 Concepts Through Play
- ros2 sonify A CLI tool that converts ROS 2 topics into sound in real-time, enabling monitoring and anomaly detection
- Announcing protoros2: use protobuf in ros2 without compromise
- ROS 2 Client Library Performance Monitoring: Midterm Progress Update
- Uv on ROS 2: a field report on workspace-level virtual environments
- Physical AI Open-source Platform: CYCLO
- Nav2 zigzag navigation in a large road environment with Isaac Sim
- Rosbag Resurrector — a pandas-like analysis + ML-export workbench for ROS 2 bags
- Curobo_ros v2 – GPU-accelerated motion planning wrapper, now on cuRobo v0.8.0
- Rclnodejs 2.1: Native ESM for a Web-Native ROS 2 SDK
- What should go in the tag?
- ROS 2 Realtime Support Package
- Letting Python Be Python: Should ROS 2 be less strict with the Python ecosystem?
- Proposal:
rcl_executors- a unified, canonical reference executor package for all client libraries - VectorField Planner: 7 µs global path queries with strict optimality
- A compositional approach to verifying modular robotic systems
- MASLAB 2025 – MIT ROS Lectures
- Lenna-Stereo-Camera: Camera module for Imx219-83 · GitHub
- Building a Robot in ROS 2 From Scratch, Part 5: building an actual map of the space
- “A Tale of Two Cultures: Can Agentic Coding Close the Gap?” plenary by Ken Goldberg at ICRA 2026 (Video)
- GaP: A Graph-as-Policy Multi-Agent Self-Learning Harness For Variational Automation Tasks
- FreeCAD MCP (Model Context Protocol) server
- Reinforcement Learning for Robotics Part 2: Train a Balance Bot with PPO (Video)
- robomaster_ros: ROS 2 for DJI Robomaster EP and S1
- A Godot 4 client for ROS TCP Endpoint
- dskkato/ros2_cuda_ipc: ROS 2/CUDA IPC support
- Automatically Generate CallbackIsolatedExecutor config skeletons
- toio_ros2 is ROS 2 package for using toio.
- mROS-base
- Roboplan Release 0.6.0
- OpenCat-Quadruped-Robot: An open source quadruped robot pet framework
Got a Minute? 
ROSCon Global is six weeks away and regular ticket sales end in two weeks! Make sure to get your tickets and please help us spread the word.