ROS News for the Week of February 9th, 2026
This week we got up a skeleton web page for our 2026 Global ROSCon in Toronto, meanwhile ROSCon JP and ROSCon HR have posted their CFP deadlines. Otherwise there are bunch of meetups that were just announced for Mountain View, Barcelona, Moscow, and Heilbronn. Details in the event section below.
NVIDIA Isaac ROS 4.1 for Thor has been released! They’re giving the people what they want, as this release removes the Docker requirements and introduces a new virtual environment and bare metal modes that make it easier to integrate Isaac ROS packages into your existing setup.
Our colleagues at PickNik and Motive Space Systems just landed a couple of big contracts to flight test Space ROS along with MoveIt Pro. That’s one small step for Space ROS, and a giant leap for ROS-kind.
Looking for a project to contribute to? @ZKWeng just announced a slick package to collect and stream hand position data from the Metaquest headset.. He’s looking for a couple of experienced ROS devs to create a ROS package to wrap the tool so that data can be streamed directly to a robot.
The ROS 2 MedKit folks have a interesting post about the current state of ROS diagnostics that’s worth a read. What do you think? How can we support better system diagnostics for ROS?
RESERVOIR just joined the OSRA as our newest member. Welcome to the club!
Events
- 2025-02-16 ROS Open Embedded Community Meeting #49
- 2026-02-18 The Future Of Food Robotics - Northwest Robotics Alliance
- 2026-02-26 PX4/ROS By-The-Bay February Meetup
- 2026-03-12 7th ROS Meetup Barcelona
- 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.
- 2026-07-02 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
- Reservoir joins the OSRA
- Motiv Space Systems and PickNik Robotics partner on software for NASA’s Fly Foundational Robotics mission
- Why Democratizing Access to Robotics Matters (Video)
- Upside Robotics is reducing fertilizer use and waste in corn crops
- Humanoid robot startup Apptronik has now raised $935M at a $5B+ valuation
- Boston Dynamics CEO Robert Playter steps down after 30 years at the company
- LimX Dynamics picks up $200M for humanoid robot expansion
- Overland AI raises $100M to scale autonomy with the U.S. armed forces
- Apptronik brings in another $520M to ramp up Apollo production
- Trener Robotics raises $32M for robot-agnostic skills platform
- PickNik Robotics to work with Motiv Space Systems on NASA ISAM mission
- Motiv Space Systems and PickNik Robotics Collaborate on Space ROS
- Boston Dynamics CEO Robert Playter steps down
- Lidar maker Ouster adds cameras with StereoLabs acquisition – Discourse
- Gazebo PMC Meeting Minutes 2026-02-09
- Robot Collective, Atlas Acrobatics, and More Videos
- Latin America’s AI Opportunity: From Adoption to Co-Creation Through Open Source
ROS
NVIDIA Isaac ROS 4.1 for Thor has arrived- Help Wanted: Metaquest Hand Tracking Streamer Toolkit ROS 2 Node
- Krill: multiprocs orchestrator for robotics
- What’s missing from ROS 2 diagnostics (and what we built)
- ros2/rclpy Google Code Wiki
- PointCloudCrafter: A toolkit for extracting, manipulating, and evaluating point clouds and 3D spatial maps
- Rclcpp_async: Header-only C++20 async/await for ROS 2
- Awesome CAN bus tools
- YOLOs-CPP: Cross-Platform Production-ready C++ inference engine for YOLO models
- Letting Python Be Python: Should ROS 2 be less strict with the Python ecosystem? Notably pip, conda, venv
- Pixi as a co-official way of installing ROS on Linux?
- Performance Characteristics for Navigation
ros-removehas been released- The First Large-Scale Agentic Skill Library for Robotics, Computer Vision, and Physical AI
- Henki ROS 2 Best Practices For People and AI
- PlotJugler 2026: it needs your help!
- Depth Of Field Simulator
- InfiniDepth: Arbitrary-Resolution and Fine-Grained Depth Estimation with Neural Implicit Fields
- TRLC’s DK1 Leader Follower Arm
- awesome-robotics: A list of awesome Robotics resources
- Big updates for pySLAM
- NVIDIA PhysicalAI Robotics Kitchen Dataset
- SAM3 transfers 2D semantics onto 3D point clouds
- Cute Spider Robot
- A Robot Butler in a Day
- OORB Studio, The Replit For Robotics
- Weekly Robotics #347
- ROS Node for Text to Speech
- MM-Hand 1.0 Open Source? Hand
- Do a kick flip! Humanoid Edition
- Do a kick flip! Quadruped edition
- MuJoCo 3.5 Released
- ROS drivers for Bosch Off-Highway sensor systems
- A stream-based runtime-verification framework for generating hard real-time C code
- A ROS 2 tool for exporting bags to human readable files
- Big MOLA and MRPT updates
- ros2_medkit: a ROS 2 Jazzy diagnostics and remote operations toolkit
- ROS-PI-CNC a ROS 2 interface for controlling CNC machines via a Raspberry Pi and Arduino running GRBL
- Building Robotics Applications with Ryzen AI and ROS 2
- An Efficient and Versatile Framework for Multi-Contact Optimal Control
- pinocchio: A fast and flexible implementation of Rigid Body Dynamics algorithms and their analytical derivatives
- An autonomous Turtlebot 4 for Hide & Seek
- gazebo_terrain_generator: A simple tool to generate gazebo terrain using satellite images and DEM data
- Ekumen:ROS 2 Migration Paths & Pitfalls
Jobs
Got a Minute? 
You are always welcome to do a PR review for any repo in the ROS 2 and GazeboSim Github orgs, alternatively here are few recently created issues:
- Help Wanted in ros2/rosbag2 Enable coordination across multiple recorder/player instances by scheduling services at a shared future timestamp
- Help Wanted in ros2/launch Add colorlog support
- Help Wanted in ros2/ros2_documentation
New Page: ROS 2 Mirror Guide - Help Wanted in gazebosim/gz-sim Add hit entity information to RaycastResultInfo