ROS News for the week of August 10th, 2026
Just ten days remain to purchase regular price tickets for ROSCon Global in Toronto.
If you need corporate approval to travel to ROSCon it is now or never!
Next week is Foxglove’s Actuate conference in San Francisco. There are also various meetups and events affiliated with Actuate that are happening that week as well. The following week we have a Trossen X ROS Industry Night in San Francisco, our online Gazebo Community Meeting on reinforcement learning, and the Ruggedize agricultural technology and robotics conference in Salinas.
Our friends at Robot.com (formerly Kiwibot) have released semantic_segmentation_layer, a Nav2 costmap layer for semantic segmentation. If you are looking to add additional information to your Nav2 stack this looks like a really good production-ready solution.
Watti is an animatronic lamp reminiscent of the Pixar lamp. The source code hasn’t been released yet but I’m told it runs ROS 2. What I find really interesting is that this work dovetails with the work of the Input Inc. who spoke at our ROS By-The-Bay meetup last night. Both groups are working on tools that make it much easier to build interactive robots and animitronic displays. Perhaps we need a new animatronics community group?
I love parametric design. My CAD skills aren’t great, so I often build small 3D printing projects using OpenSCAD. This week I came across this awesome parametric 3D-printed robot gripper configurator called Fingermod. It lets you choose from a variety of designs and configure them via a friendly web-ui. Maybe someone could vibe code a nice OpenSCAD to web-UI configurator tool to make building robot tools like this easier.
Have a cheap Feetech servo? NORI MotorLab is a browser-based workspace for testing and characterizing 12 V Feetech STS3215, STS3250, and STS3095 servos. MotorLab provides multi-servo telemetry, individual and bus-wide motion controls, live tuning, recording, encoder centering, EEPROM configuration, and a guarded motor-ID station.
Events
- 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 Gazebo Community Meeting: Reinforcement Learning in Gazebo
- 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
- 2026-09-08 ROS Meet Up Stockholm @ Nordic Tech Week
- 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
- Ten days remain for regular price 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
- ROS PMC Minutes for August 4, 2026
- ROS PMC Minutes for August 11, 2026 - ROS / ROS PMC
- This Week at Open Robotics Headquarters (2026-08-03)
Want to get involved with ROS 2? Come to Waffle- OpenCV AI Competition 2026
- DARPA Lift Challenge (Video)
- A close look at drones from the DARPA Lift Challenge (Video) - more
- Gritt exits stealth with $32 million for robots to build solar plants — then, everything else
- Robots on Wall Street: Non-traditional paths to public markets for robotics companies
- Robot Videos: DARPA Heavy Lift Challenge, Grippers, More
- How a Smart Recycling Robot Dismantles Old Devices
ROS
- GSoC 2026: ROS 2 Client Library Performance Monitoring: Midterm Progress Update
- GSoC 2026: Add Support for Mixin Composition in Colcon-Mixin
- Check your launch files for common errors: introducing lint_launch
- I built a 3D-printed tracked robot using Arduino Mega
- semantic_segmentation_layer: Nav2 costmap layer for semantic segmentation · GitHub
- grove-g1: An autonomy stack for the Unitree G1 humanoid, built on ROS 2
- feetech-motorlab: Device-agnostic web bench for Feetech servo characterization and configuration
- Finger Mod: 3D printed gripper configurator
- Watti: A desk lamp that’s learning to be more than a lamp
- New Packages and patch release for Lyrical 2026-08-07
- New packages for Humble Hawksbill 2026-08-07
- How we analyze robot behavior with LLMs — rosbags as SQL
- How we used vision and force feedback to insert networking and fiber-optic connectors with a robot for Intrinsic - AI for Industry Challenge - GitHub
- cuRobo (Nvidia) and ROS 2 for Robotic Motion Planning
- Transforming Air Cargo Operations: Optimizing with Vision & Robotics - OpenCV Live Ep. 220
- ROS-Industrial: From URDF to SimReady: What a Robotiq Gripper Taught Us About Simulation Assets
- Congestion-aware traffic planning for dense and narrow industrial environments
- Metriplane v0.3.0: turn recorded workcell incidents into repeatable regression tests
- Nectar SDK: ROS 2 companion stack for autonomous UAVs
- LaserPerception v0.1.0 — PointPillars + TensorRT + ROS 2 with honest deployment benchmarks
- Fix for AdvancedLiftDrag Pitching Moment Computation
- Autonomous Warehouse AMR with ROS 2 Jazzy, Gazebo Harmonic and Nav2
- Analyzing rosbags with LLMs and SQL + queryable Nav2 behavior trees
- Has a CPU shared-memory backend for rosidl::Buffer been explored?
- OpenMantaClaus - Open source low-cost ROS2-based AUV for SAUVC
- rostree v1.0.0: explore your ROS 2 dependency graph from the terminal, or in your browser
- Properly close windows processes, discussion about implementation
- Ros2_test_compose: a YAML-to-pytest generator for ROS2 integration testing
- ROS 2 Based Face Tracking Display Control with PiPER Robotic Arm
- Exploring a human-reviewed ROS 2 agentic pipeline generator
- Botbot Build out Video
- Mppi_controller_cuda — CUDA-accelerated MPPI local planner for ROS1 & ROS2
- ROS 2 Dev Container Feature + Workspace Update
- Experimental order-sensitive consistency residual for Odometry/TF streams — minimal C++ reproducer
- GZ Weather System – Realistic Rain & Snow Simulation for Gazebo
- 3D OctoMap SLAM on a TurtleBot3 Burger
- Physical AI Open-source Platform: CYCLO
- LEAP_sprayer: Codebase for the LEAP Weed Sprayer Project
- Book: ROS 2: Zero to Robot
- Multi-Mapcher: Loop closure detection-free heterogeneous LiDAR multi-session SLAM leveraging outlier-robust registration for autonomous vehicles (T-IV) - paper -paper, but free
- Plot Juggler Release 3.999.9
- hijimasa/ROS-TCP-Connector
- Husarion ROSbot ROS 2 driver v1.0.0 released!
- Unity ROS 2 sample code
- OmniGuide: Universal Guidance Fields for Enhancing Generalist Robot Policies
Jobs
- Seegrid Senior Engineering Lead - Autonomy
- PickNik Robotics Software Engineer (work on space stuff
)
Got a minute? 
Want to get involved with ROS 2? Come to our weekly Waffle meeting where we’ll assign you a pull request that needs a review! The next meeting is 2026-08-20T16:30:00Z. Can’t make it? Check out our Waffle (baffle) Board to quickly find open pull requests that need reviewing.
Yes, you can review ROS pull requests even if you aren’t a regular contributor! You don’t need to be a ROS expert! We just really need a second set of eyes to catch any glaring mistakes before a pull request gets merged.