ROS News for the Week of January 12th, 2026
Our next ROS By-The-Bay Meetup will be on January 29th with the calibration gurus at Main Street Autonomy.
Our next Gazebo Community Meeting will be on Wednesday, January 28th. Our speakers will be the team at Forest3D, a Blender plugin that can automatically generate realistic outdoor scenes for Gazebo.
Speaking of Blender, LinkForge is a native blender extension for visual URDF/Xacro editing with ROS 2 support.
TBAI, or towards better athletic intelligence, implements and makes fully open-source countless state-of-the-art methods for controlling various sorts of robots, including quadrupeds, humanoids, and industrial robotic arms.
NVIDIA’s PyCuVSLAM is a highly accurate and efficient VSLAM system for Python.
Want to help with making ROS run faster on GPU systems? Our colleagues at NVIDIA just posted an update on ROS native buffers for GPU acceleration. Comments are welcomed and encouraged!
Events
- 2026-01-28 Gazebo Community Meeting: Forest3D
- 2026-01-29 ROS By-The-Bay with Main Street Autonomy
- 2026-01-30 Dronecode + Septentrio Meetup: Leuven, Belgium
- 2026-1-31 => 2026-02-01 FOSDEM - Robot Dev Room
- 2026-01-31 = > 2026-02-01 Physical AI Hackathon San Francisco – Details
- 2026-02-12 Mass Robotics Form Function Challenge Application Deadline
- 2026-02-11 Intrinsic AI for Industry Challenge Deadline
- 2025-05-22 Stanford Robotics Drone Hackathon
- 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
- Community meeting: Accelerating Physics-Based Multibeam Sonar Simulation for Underwater Robotics on CUDA
News
- Gazebo Kura Roadmap
- Gazebo PMC Meeting Minutes 2026-01-12
- 2026 Maritime Community Working Group Monthly Meetings
- 350+ ROS and Gazebo jobs
- Robotics software maker Skild AI hits $14B valuation
- Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) CFP Closes Soon
- I met a lot of weird robots at CES — here are the most memorable
- MassRobotics opens applications for fourth Form and Function Robotics Challenge
- Mytra closes $120M funding for pallet-storing robots
- Skild AI raises $1.4B to build ‘omni-bodied’ robot brain
- Caterpillar partners with NVIDIA to lay the foundation for autonomous systems
- A3 releases full three-part national safety standard for industrial robots
- Robots to navigate hiking trails
- Turtlebot 4 and iRobot
ROS
Update on ROS native buffers to help improve ROS performance on GPUs.- LinkForge: A Native Blender Extension for Visual URDF/Xacro Editing (ROS 2 Support)
- NVIDIA PyCuVSLAM: Highly accurate and efficient VSLAM system for Python
- TBAI - towards better athletic intelligence
- Pixi as a co-official way of installing ROS on Linux
- Simple status webpage for a robot in localhost?
- Why Some ROS 2 Nodes Are Hard to Test (and How Design Fixes It)
- How to work with MCAP in Rerun
- RoboSumo RL for competitve robots
- ROS 2 wrapper for curobo
- New packages for Kilted Kaiju 2026-01-14
- Update your Gazebo apt sources for Jetty
- Controllable DJI osmo gimbal - gauging interest in a ROS driver?
- Performance Characteristics: subscription callback signatures, RMW implementation, Intra-process communication (IPC)
- Upcoming behavior change: Improved log file flushing in rcl_logging_spdlog
- Creating an Agentic Skill Library for Robotics, Computer Vision, and Physical AI
- Ferronyx – Real-Time ROS 2 Observability & Automated RCA
- Yet Another Hand Eye Calibration Toolkit
- ROS 2 Bag Manager
- Awesome list of ROS 2 packages
- ROS 2 Gazebo Sim Plugin Tutorial Series
- turtlebot4_rpi5: Raspberry Pi 5 intergration with Turtlebot 5
- Example ArduPilot–MAVROS–ROS 2 integration
- koch_ros: ros2_control packages for controlling a koch v1.1 low cost robot
- ROS 2 Pick & Kick: Particle Tachyon + Edge Impulse YOLO-Pro
- SurroundVisionROS2: Vehicle surround-view stack
- Orient Anything Model
- Inchworm Robot
- Primitive-Swarm: An Ultra-lightweight and Scalable Planner for Large-scale Aerial Swarms
- How to Upgrade Your Clearpath Robots to ROS 2
- Free Motion Capture for Everyone
- Gazebo simultion for the Toio robot
- Big list of robotics courses
- @facontidavide “All about my obsession with logging…”
- A MapLibre plugin for visualizing LiDAR Point Cloud – video
Got a Minute? 
Want to contribute to the OSRF family of open source projects? Here are some great starter tasks:
Feature Requests
Here are some help wanted issues from across the ROS 2 project that were posted this week.
- Help Wanted in ros2/rmw_zenoh Development Plan for Missing RMW implementations
- Help Wanted in ros2/rcl Improve documentation of rcl_XYZ_set_on_new_XYZ_callback
- Help Wanted in ros2/common_interfaces geometry_msgs document inertia tensor reference point
- Help Wanted in ros2/rmw_zenoh Just like fastdds_backend_statistics
- Help Wanted in ros2/ros2_documentation Canonical URL generation logic can lead to incorrect mirror results
- Help Wanted in ros2/rviz Request FrameAligned view, as in ROS1
PR Reviews Requested
Our ROS Infrastructure team has requested help reviewing some outstanding PRs. Everyone is welcome to do a review and post a quick LGTM.
- Colcon: Correct cd history when going to package not on current PWD
- Colcon-Mixin: Enable show subverb to print yamllint compliant YAML
- Chef: Unattended upgrades cherry-pick
- Chef: Osrfbuild mac bringup
- Create Repo: Tidy up the Python wheel files
- Create Repo: Add ‘sync’ command to Python client
- Create Repo: Switch test fixture metadata compression to gzip
- Create Repo: Always invalidate matching packages during sync
- CI: Add support for building on RHEL 10