ROS News for the Week of April 27th, 2026
The Lyrical Luth Test and Tutorial Party is live! We could really use your help testing this release. We’ve got over
testing tickets we need to work through by May 14th, and we really need help from the community to make it happen! Up to date installation details can be found here. Our top 20 testers will get there choice of OSRA membership or ROS swag!
The ROS 2 Lyrical Luth Release Illustration and swag has been released. Show your ROS pride and help support the OSRF by picking up a shirt or a mug.
I’ve been asking for it for a year now and it finally happened! Gaussian splat visualizations are now possible in RViz using RVizSplat, a real-time 3D gaussian splatting plugin. You can snag the source code here.
Navigating outdoors without GPS is still and extremely difficult task in modern robotics. tercom_nav is an implementation of TERCOM+ESKF navigation for GPS denied UAV navigation. There’s even a full simulation example available that uses Gazebo and PX4. You can check out a video demo of the sim here.
Building upon the annual ROS Metrics Report, @Anis_Koubaa has released an analysis of over 8000 academic ROS papers that has been accepted into ACM Computing Surveys. If you are looking for some hard data on what ROS users are working on please do take a look!
The mesh_tools: library, which adds tools and messages for annotated 3D triangle meshes in ROS / RViz, has been upgraded to ROS 2. Pair this with the Gaussian Splat utility above and go have some fun!
The Computational Robotics Laboratory at Czech Technical University in Prague (CTU) has release crl_ws_manager: A ws command for ROS 2 colcon workspaces. You can, build, clean, navigate, and inspect packages — without typing long paths or remembering Colcon flags. It works with unsourced and uninstalled packages. No dependencies, pure bash.
Events
- 2026-05-03 Robotics Meetup Bremen
- 2026-05-04 => 2026-05-08 SPACERAISE Space Robotics Summer School
- 2026-05-04 Cloud Robotics WG Meeting – Custom Capabilities in Transitive Robotics
- 2026-05-04 OpenCV Conference OSCCA in LA
- 2026-05-04 ROS Deliberation Community Group Meeting
- 2026-05-04 Physical AI Happy Hour: Paris
- 2026-05-07 Physical AI Happy Hour: Munich
- 2026-05-16 ROS Japan UG #62 Vibe Codingしばりのハッカソン
- 2026-05-17 ROBORACER @ ICRA 2026
- 2026-05-21 Second ROS Meetup Karlsruhe
- 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
- 2026-05-25 Toronto Robotics Community Event
- 2026-05-06 => 2026-05-08 Week of Robotics Odense Denmark
- 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
- 2026-06-22 => 2026-06-26 iRoboCity2030 Summer School 2026: ROS 2, AI and Field Robotics
- 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
- 2026-08-03 => 2026-08-07 FZI Robotics Summer School 2026 - Apply
- 2026-08-04 => 2026-08-05 ROSCon JP 2026 スポンサーの紹介
- 2026-08-02 Montreal Robotics Summer School
- 2026-08-18 → 2026-08-19 Foxglove Actuate 26
- 2026-08-26 → 2026-08-27 Ruggedize Agricultural Technology & Robotics Conference
- 2026-09-22 => 2026-09-24 Global ROSCon 2026 in Toronto
- 2026-10-27 => 2026-10-28 ROSCon España Valencia
- 2026-11-05 International Conference on Humanoid Robotics, Innovation & Leadership
- 2026-11-25 => 2026-11-26 ROSCon Belgium 2026
News
ROS 2 Lyrical Luth Release Illustration and Swag 
- Gazebo PMC Meeting Minutes 2026-04-27
- Community Group Proposal: Automated ROS Upgrade Assistant
- Coupling Clocks: How Fireflies Inspired a Distributed Clock Synchronization Algorithm
- ROBORACER @ ICRA 2026 - AutoDRIVE Ecosystem
- Call for ICRA 2026 Science Communication Ambassadors
- ROS (2) M Name Brainstorming
- NIST Humanoid Robot Baseline Performance Benchmark
- Participants wanted for a survey on tooling and AI use in the ROS community!
- Videos: Humanoid Robot Production, Mars Rovers, More
- DAIMON Robotics Wants to Give Robot Hands a Sense of Touch
- Project CETI deploys autonomous underwater gliders to better observe sperm whales
- SquareMind raises $18M for robotic dermatology platform
- Pudu Robotics raises nearly $150M as it targets industrial applications
- Reliable Robotics raises funding for fully automated aircraft
- Weekly Robotics #358
ROS
- Lyrical Luth Test and Tutorial Party Instructions
- ROS Lyrical Luth Beta and Call for Testing
- RVizSplat — Real-time 3D Gaussian Splatting in RViz 2 – source
- tercom_nav: Implementation of TERCOM+ESKF for GPS Denied UAV Navigation - Video - Simulation Example
- mesh_tools: Tools and Messages for Annotated 3D Triangle Meshes in ROS
- crl_ws_manager: A ws command for ROS 2 colcon workspaces
- ROS 2 in a Nutshell: A Survey
- I’m done manually tuning DDS parameters!
- Comparing Global Planners for navigation
- When to Use ROS 2 (and When to Skip It): A Guide for Makers and Engineers
- Enhancing ROS 2 Network Visibility and Attribution with eBPF Kernel Probes
- Buoyancy and hydrodynamics improvements across Gazebo
- Zenoh 1.8.0 packages available on packages.osrfoundation.org (prerelease)
- ROS2 Console Tools
- RobotCAD 10.8.1 new AI tool - Generate robot from primitives by text
- What are you using for containerization in ROS deployments?
- micro-ROS public infrastructure transition
- Request for testing on pyspacemouse
- New Packages for ROS 2 Rolling Ridley 2026-04-28
- New collision avoidance exercise at Unibotics robot programming website: DWA
- Private URDF/Xacro validation (no storage, CI-ready)
- Introducing swift-ros2: a native Swift client library for ROS 2, now open source
- URDF Validation + Kinematic Analysis API with Browser-Based Preview (Tested on Robonaut 2)
- Dockerized robotics development should be easy!
- Open Source ROS1 to ROS2 Version Converter SDK
- Axon: an open source USB bridge for robot I/O
- This Robot Dog Has Zero Gears (Video) – CARA 2.0 Project Files
- Gazebo Community Meeting: Building an LED Gazebo Plugin (Video)
- Updates to OMPL
- New PlotJuggler Release
- The Polymath Code Standard: How We Maintain Consistent Style Across Every Repository
- openarmx_tools: This package provides a set of control tools for the OpenArmX robot
- ros2-depth-anything-v3-trt: ROS2 TensorRT Node for Monocular Metric Depth estimation and Point Cloud generation from camera images with Depth Anything V3
- Robot Workspace and Reachability Analysis in the Browser
- Wireless Stepper Motor Driver with ESP32 and TMC2240
- robotics-coursework: Places where you can learn robotics (and stuff like that) online
- best-of-robot-simulators: A Best-of-list of Robot Simulators, re-generated weekly on Wednesdays
- mjswan: MuJoco Simulation on Web Assembly with Neural netwroks
- leslider: A Simple Slider Add-on For SO101 Robot Arm
Got a Minute? 
The Lyrical Luth Test and Tutorial Party is live! We really need your help! It is a lot easier to fix Lyrical bugs during the beta than after the release. If you’ve never cotributed to core ROS this is a great place to start.