ROS News for the Week of February 16th, 2026
The 2025 ROS Metrics report is out (3.7 MB) you can also check the Discourse post more detailed information.
The TL;DR is that ROS 2 is growing like crazy and that the era of ROS 1 is over. Package downloads are up 85% and we’re just shy of 1 BILLION downloads annually. ROS 2 now makes up over 90% of all ROS downloads.
Next week we’ve got a Gazebo Community Meeting scheduled with @saiaravind19 , who will present his work on generating realistic terrains in Gazebo using satellite imagery and DEM data (note that we’ll be meeting at 2pm PT, not 9am PT). We also have a ROS By-The-Bay meetup scheduled for next Thursday where our guest speakers will be @mrpollo from the Dronecode Foundation, and Zeerek Ahmad, a senior controls engineer at Polymath Robotics. On the regional ROSCon front ROSCon France has been announced, the event will be in Paris June 22nd through 26th.
Building custom hardware interface for ROS 2 is still a bit of a dark art. While there is a ton of educational materials on the basics of using ROS, there aren’t a ton of resources on how to build a ROS 2 robots from the ground up starting with just a servos and motor driver board. @adityakamath has a great blog post on building a ROS Control-based interface to the insanely popular and affordable Feetech servos that is worth reading and book marking.
Looking for a quick and easy way to process your LIDAR data into “the ground” and “everything else” buckets? Check out GSeg3D, a high-precision grid-based ground segmentation package for safety-critical autonomous driving and robotics applications. The package consists of an underlying C++ library, a Humble / Jazzy ROS 2 package, and a published paper.
Events
- 2026-02-25 February Gazebo Community Meeting (Note: New Time)
- 2026-02-26 PX4/ROS By-The-Bay February Meetup
- 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
- 2026-03-12 7th ROS Meetup Barcelona
- 2026-03-18 Interoperability Framework: Working Group Formation
- 2026-03-20 ROS Meetup Moscow 2026. Remote participation is possible
- 2026-03-23 ROS Heilbronn Meetup at Bildungscampus
- 2026-03-30 ROSCon Croatia
- 2026-04-17 Intrinsic AI for Industry Challenge Deadline – More details
- 2026-05-04 => 2026-05-08 SPACERAISE Space Robotics Summer School
- 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
- 2026-09-22 => 2026-09-24 Global ROSCon 2026 in Toronto
News
- ROS PMC Minutes for January 20, 2026
- ROS PMC Minutes for February 3, 2026
- ROS PMC Minutes for Februrary 10, 2026
- ROS PMC Minutes for Februrary 17, 2026
- Amazon halts Blue Jay robotics project after less than 6 months
- ARM Institute opens project call for military supply chain technology
- The keys to designing safe and shared cobot workspaces
- High-precision robots: What to do when absolute accuracy is poor?
- Trener Robotics raises $32M for robot-agnostic skills platform
- Assistive Technology: Navigate Safely With Strutt EV1
- OSRF Board Member, Sabine Hauert, appointed an Honorary Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by His Majesty the King for services to robotics
- BotBot selected as a Deep Tech Pioneer by Hello Tomorrow
- Intrinsic AI for Industry Challenge Selects Judges
- Weekly Robotics #348
- New ROS group in Naija / Nigeria
ROS
2025 ROS Metrics Report
Ground Segmentation Library + ROS 2 Integration!- Hardware Abstraction for STS3215 Servos
- Gazebo Harmonic / ROS 2 Jazzy / Nav2 Ackermann Steering Example
- Low-cost ROS 2 Jazzy CNC Plotter with LLM Agent
- Occupancy grids, point clouds and meshes.. oh my!
- ROS 2 Lyrical C++ Version (i.e. C++20?)
- Should we add a list of ROS 2 Robots on docs.ros.org?
- TFL: Mutex-free tf2 alternative for ROS 2. Experimental rewrite of tf2’s BufferCore.
- 46 New and 722 Updated Packages for ROS 2 Humble Hawksbill
- Agent ROS Bridge — Universal LLM-to-ROS bridge with auto-generated types
- Draft REP 0156:2026
ros2logCommand Line Interface - ROS 2 interface to Doly Robot
- Traffic Management Interfaces for the Next Generation
- Your Robot’s Fault Log Is a Haystack. The Real Error Is the Needle
- LinkForge v1.2.3: 100% Type Safety, Parser Hardening & ROS-Agnostic Assets
- Service for robot description?
- Cornea: Image Segmentation Skills from the Telekinesis Agentic Skill Library
- Open-source ROS 2 Brain for Legged Robots
- Letting Python Be Python: Should ROS 2 be less strict with the Python ecosystem?
- 3 Lines of C++ That Give Your Robot a Fault Memory
- Am I the only one who wants matching ROS 2 & Gazebo names?
- Performance Characteristics: subscription callback signatures, RMW implementation, Intra-process communication
- Reproducible actuator-boundary safety (SSC + conformance harness)
- Ament (and CMake) understanding
- Tinny-Robot Px4 Vision Autonomy
- RoboPlan Release 0.2.0
- EasyNav moves from GPLv3 to Apache 2.0
- Gazebo / ArduPilot Example
- A Smooth Control Law for Graceful Motion of Differential Wheeled Mobile Robots in 2D Environment
- ROS 2 SDK to consume hand tracking streamer telemetry
- Build Your Own Pro-Grade 3D Scanner Without the Commercial Price Tag
- VGGT-SLAM: Dense RGB SLAM Optimized on the SL(4) Manifold
- BehaviorTree.CPP Groot2 v. 4.8
- URDF-Importer: an URDF importer tool
- OpenDroneMap: A command line toolkit to generate maps, point clouds, 3D models and DEMs from drones
- ROSBag 2 GS
- Autonomous vehicle control algorithm examples.
- The Physical AI Roadmap: From Microcontrollers to Autonomous Robots (Video)
- Running ROS 2 Onboard Luxonis OAK4-D
- Open source FANUC robot control library for Python and Rust
- Transact: An Open-source Robot Fleet Management Dashboard
Jobs
Got a Minute? 
We could use some help!
- Help Wanted in ros2/ros2_documentation
New Page: ROS 2 Mirror Guide - Help Wanted in gazebosim/docs Gazebo Performance Tuning Guide
- Help Wanted ros2/rclpy RCLPY handles time being set back differently to RCLCPP