ROS News for the Week of January 25th, 2026
We have a ton of ROS and open source robotics events schedule for February and the tail end of January. This weekend is FOSDEM which includes a new Robot Dev Room. Full list below in the events section.
Unrelated: Discourse released a new carousel feature for image grids. Learn more here.
This week @tnajjar merged a very nice UX upgrade for the ROS CLI: fuzzy finding! Now you can just type any part of a command string and see everything that matches! Think “search” not “autocomplete”. This new feature is now in Rolling and will be available in the Lyric release this spring.
I’ve said this before, but if you are looking for a lower-effort / higher impact place to contribute to the ROS project the ROS CLI is where it is at!
Our colleagues over at High Torque have released Panthera-HT, a fully open-source 6-axis robotic arm! The Panthera-HT currently offers control interfaces in C++, Python, and ROS 2 and includes PVT control, impeadance control, gravity and friction compensation, leader-follower teleoperation, and drag to teach functionality. The platform also supports data collection and inference within the LeRobot framework.
I absolutely love this simple and elegant Rubik’s cube solver robot by @RickSamu. Just two actuators and a camera are used in the robot and the software stack is built entirely using ROS 2! Rick is in the process of cleaning up the code for its initial release.
Events
- 2026-1-31 => 2026-02-01 FOSDEM - Robot Dev Room
- 2026-01-31 = > 2026-02-01 Physical AI Hackathon San Francisco – Details
- 2026-02-02 Cracow Robotics & AI Meetup #13
- 2026-02-04 The Future of Physical Intelligence w/ Berkeley’s Prof. Ken Golberg
- 2026-02-05 Robotics Meetup Bremen
- 2026-02-10 SG ROS Meetup: 2026 kickoff of ROS Meetup Singapore
- 2026-02-11 Intrinsic AI for Industry Challenge Deadline
- 2026-02-12 Mass Robotics Form Function Challenge Application Deadline
- 2026-02-17 REK Robot Boxing in San Francisco
- 2026-02-26 PX4/ROS By-The-Bay February Meetup
- 2026-03-23 ROS Heilbronn Meetup at Bildungscampus
- 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
- 2026-07-29 => 2026-08-04 IEEE RAS Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems in Prague
News
- Gazebo PMC Meeting Minutes 2026-01-26
- ROS PMC Minutes for January 27, 2026 - ROS / ROS PMC
- PlotJugler 2026: it needs your help
- Open CV The Low-Power Computer Vision Challenge 2026
- Hadrian raises funding for automated manufacturing, bringing valuation to $1.6B
- Zipline raises over $600M in funding, surpasses 2M commercial drone deliveries
- New books: “Forge Your Future with Open Source” & “Business Success with Open Source” by OSRA board advisor @vmb
- Boston Dynamics releases Spot and Orbit 5.1 with new Spot Cam
- Microsoft Research reveals Rho-alpha vision-language-action model for robots
- New York Robotics launches with 160 startups in its ecosystem
- RobCo raises Series C funding to scale industrial automation
- 9 weeks to 9 days: How autonomous drilling is transforming data center construction
Introducing Sprout, a new humanoid development platform- Multiply Labs partners with AstraZeneca to automate cell therapy manufacturing
- Need a new game? RoboCo on Steam.
- Videos: Multitasking Robots, Skiing Bipedal Bots, More
- Weekly Robotics #345
- The Amp Hour: Robots Everywhere with Aaed Musa
- Oshen built the first ocean robot to collect data in a Category 5 hurricane
ROS
- Autonomous Rubik’s Cube Solver with ROS 2 & Raspberry Pi: Project RS1
- Ros2cli, meet fzf
- Panthera-HT —— A Fully Open-Source 6-Axis Robotic Arm
- Clingwrap: A ROS 2 launch wrapper to simplify writing python launch files
- Cross-Platform Package Management for Modern C++ Development with Pixi - Ruben Arts @ CppCon 2025
- iRobot’s ROS benchmarking suite now available!
- ros2_unbag: Fast, organized data extraction
- Native ROS 2 Jazzy Debian packages for Raspberry Pi OS / Debian Trixie (arm64)
- Gazebo Community meeting: Forest3D
- SensorGuardian - Open Source ROS 2 Diagnostics Tool
- New Packages for Jazzy Jalisco 2026-01-28
- Stop SSH-ing into robots to find the right rosbag. We built a visual Rolling Buffer for ROS2
- Implementation of UR Robotic Arm Teleoperation with PIKA SDK
- Should feature-adding/deprecating changes to core repos define feature flags?
- ROS 2 framework for automated task planning and execution
- Use Rerun with ROS 2
- Asimov, an open-source humanoid robot
- BCR Bot: A mobile robot simulation
- Rust-based Stereo Visual-Inertial Odometry
- NeuracoreAI example with an AgileX Robot
- Mathematical Methods for Computer Vision, Robotics, and Graphics
- In-the-Wild Compliant Manipulation with UMI-FT
- CoinFT: A Coin-Sized, Capacitive 6-axis Force/Torque Sensor for Robotic Applications
- breadcrumb: A ROS graph static analysis tool that works with cake and clingwrap
- cake: Declarative code generation for ROS 2 nodes
- dynamic_mesh: A ROS package that creates a filtered moving mesh from an incoming pointcloud topic
- Micro Epsilon Laser Scaner ROS Driver
- reBot-DevArm: Open Source Robotic Arm for All Developers
- RQml is your modern, QML-based robotics visualization and control toolbox for ROS 2!
- ROS 2 Turtle School - WASM-based ROS CLI teaching tool.
Got a Minute?
- Help Wanted in ros2/launch_ros LoadComposableNodes should have an option to fail/shutdown if a node fails to load
- Help Wanted in ros2/common_interfaces the function read_points() of pointcloud2.py seems to change the cloud itemsize, breaks do_transform_cloud
- Help Wanted in ros2/teleop_twist_joy Feature: Add normalize_axes parameter for circular input mapping
- Help Wanted in ros2/ros2_documentation ROS 2 Mirror Guide
- Help Wanted in gazebosim/gz-common Fix the ASAN problems