ROS News for the Week of December 15th, 2025
Shout out to our colleagues at ROSCon India, which is happening right now in Pune!
This week community member @_bernardo posted a teaser video for an incredible Manta-ray biomimetic robot that uses ROS 2!
Two new Depth Anything 3 tools came out this week. First PyOctomapAnything turns any image into a PyOctoMap 3D voxel scene There’s also a new a new foundation model for panoramic depth estimation. I’ve said it before, but I would love to see a tool that allows you to quickly reconstruct a room into a Gazebo world.
A few our our European colleagues have put together a fantastic collection of ROS Workshops and training materials. Take a look or add your own tutorial!
It is the time of year where robot companies all over the world release their robot Christmas videos! This one is from our colleagues at FZI. A full list of videos is available at IEEE Spectrum
Events
- 2026-01-06 => 2026-01-07 The 7th UK Robot Manipulation Workshop
- 2026-01-30 Dronecode + Septentrio Meetup: Leuven, Belgium
- 2026-1-31 => 2026-02-01 FOSDEM - Robot Dev Room
- 2026-04-17 Intrinsic AI for Industry Challenge Deadline
- 2026-06-21 => 2026-06-26 RPL Summer school in robotics, perception and learning, Stockholm, Sweden.
- 2026-07-29 => 2026-08-04 IEEE RAS Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems in Prague
- 2026-05-23 => 2026-05-24 Open Hardware Summit 2026 in Berlin
CFP Now Open! - Community meeting: Accelerating Physics-Based Multibeam Sonar Simulation for Underwater Robotics on CUDA
News
- New Release Date for Gazebo Kura
- Gazebo PMC Meeting Minutes 2025-12-15
- How Disney built an Olaf Robot – paper
- PX4 Simulation Integration Survey
- FZI Living Lab Christmas Robotics 2025
- ADAM Robot Bartender Makes Drinks at Vegas Golden Knights Game
- Rodney Brooks, the Godfather of Modern Robotics, Says the Field Has Lost Its Way
- UPS company deploys AI to spot fakes amid surge in holiday returns
- Nvidia bulks up open source offerings with an acquisition and new open AI models
- LimX Dynamics unveils TRON 2 shape-shifting limbed robot
- RealMan Robotics open-sources its RealSource robot dataset
- A look at iRobot’s 35-year robotics journey
- Serve Robotics has deployed 2,000+ delivery robots across the U.S.
- BARA, the Bay Area Robotics Association, launches to accelerate embodied AI
- iRobot to enter Chapter 11 and be acquired by Chinese creditor
- iREX 2025 Recap – Big ROS shout out!
- RAS University - IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Free Classes
ROS
ROS Training Material Survey- Ros2_medkit: API-first diagnostics for ROS 2
- Manta-ray biomimetic ROS 2 robot
- pyocto-map-anything: Convert photos to 3D voxel scenes with AI depth estimation
- “Unofficial” Gazebo Documentation Index
- New Nav2 Tutorial: Lidar-Free Navigation Using NVIDIA Isaac Perceptor
- MOLA 2.3.0 Released - New LiDAR-Inertial Odometry Tutorial
- EKF SLAM ROS 2
- plain_slam_ros2: Lightweight Dependency-Free LiDAR-Inertial SLAM system for ROS 2
- DroneBridge for ESP32. A secure & transparent telemetry link with support for WiFi and ESP-NOW
- Real-Time Cartesian Controller for UR5/UR5e with External Sensor Feedback
- Introduction to ROS Part 12: Talking to Microcontrollers (Video)
- Upcoming ABI break in ros2_control framework
- Piper Hand-Eye Calibration
- Toio ROS 2 wrapper
- New packages for Kilted Kaiju 2025-12-12
- aruco_visual_servoing: Autonomous visual servoing package for a mobile robots
- Depth Any Panoramas: A Foundation Model for Panoramic Depth Estimation
- Performance Characteristics: subscription callback signatures, RMW implementation, Intra-process communication
- Low-cost ROS2/SLAM educational kit upgraded to Jazzy
- PIPER single-arm simulation and control on Genesis
- Upcoming a new RMW Implementation RMW_SWIFTDDS by Greenstone
- micro-ROS on Renesas MCK-RA8T2: Motor Speed Control (ROS 2 Integration Demo)(Video) - source
- Modeling LeKiwi’s omni-base in MuJoCo
- CARVER-GEN3 Autonomous Robot Platform - Custom MOLA SLAM for Livox MID-360 LiDAR + ROS 2 Humble
- Small Autonomous Mobile Robot
- Multifunctional Digital Twin-Enabled Aerospace Drilling End-Effector Deployable by a Collaborative Robot
- Code implementation of Pi-Long
- Weekly Robotics #340
- NVIDIA Labs Fast Foundation Stereo
- ACE-SLAM: Scene Coordinate Regression for Real-Time SLAM
Got a Minute? 
We’re drowning in PRs to review right now, and we could really use some help with second pull request reviews. If you have a few hours to spare, consider swinging by RCLCpp, RCLPy, or any repo in the ROS 2 org and taking a look at any PR you feel comfortable reviewing.
If you’ve never contributed to ROS before, helping us review pull requests is a great way to familiarize yourself with the code and help us out at the same time.You do not need to be a maintainer or committer to do pull request reviews for any of the core ROS packages.
