ROS News for the Week of January 5th, 2026 
TARS ROS 2: A recreation of the robot TARS from Interstellar, featuring AI capabilities..
Our brilliant colleague @youtalk just released his Conduit iOS app which transforms your Apple devices into ROS 2 sensor publishers so you can have access to its fantastic cameras and ToF sensor.. I smell a lot of phone-based ROS 2 robots in our future.
Comau has introduced their new MyCo line of cobot products with ROS 2 support out of the box.
This week @StefanFabian released RQml, a QML-based alternative to RQT. RQml is currently in beta but it supports most of the existing RQT plugins.
Over the break a ton of interesting ROS tools and utilities were released (I suspect some of them were 
vibe coded ). Ros2plot generates terminal-based topic plots similar to Plot Juggler.
Ros2_medkit is an API-first diagnostics tool for ROS 2. POIROT is a comprehensive profiling and monitoring framework for ROS 2 applications. TFTree Terminal is a CLI tool for printing your TF tree. Last, but certainly not least is Phantom Bridge is really slick web UI for robot monitoring that uses WebRTC and Socket.io
Events
- 2026-01-12 ROS Deliberation Community Group Meeting YASMIN State Machines
- 2026-01-12 ROS 2 Rust Meeting: January 2026
- 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
- 2026-04-17 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
Passing the torch on ROS Infrastructure- Decommission of ROS 1 infrastructure
- As a Newcomer to ROS & Gazebo: Eager to Contribute, Seeking Guidance
- Nominations of Mass Robotics Robotics Medal
- Take The 2026 Open Source Professionals Job Survey!
- FOSDEM 2026: Robotics & Simulation Devroom, 2nd edition!
- ROSCon 2025 & RIC-AP Summit 2025 Blog Series
- FOSSASIA Summit 2026: Call for Community Exhibitions
- JLG Advances “Job Site of the Future” Vision Through Acquisition of Canvas Robotics
- Trump administration’s ban on foreign-made drones starts this week
- Weekly Robotics #342
- Comau introduces MyCo cobot products with ROS 2 support
- Doosan Bobcat unveils RX3 autonomous concept loader
- Qualcomm introduces general-purpose architecture for robotics
- Lyte brings in $107M to build perception systems for AI-enabled robots
- Mobileye to acquire Mentee Robotics for $900M in bid to dominate physical AI
- Oshkosh acquires core technology developed by Canvas
- Orbbec releases two new Gemini stereo cameras for robotics
- List of all robotics companies at CES
- Robot Videos: Atlas Humanoid, CES 2026 Bots , and More
ROS
TARS ROS2: A recreation of the robot TARS from Interstellar, featuring AI capabilities.- Conduit iOS app—transform your Apple devices into ROS 2 sensor publishers
- Easier Protobuf and ROS 2 Integration
- Goodbye RQt, Hello RQml
- Announcing Gazebo Open Container Images
- Tf_tree_terminal
- ROS 2 RAG: A Retrieval-Augmented Generation pipeline for ROS 2
- Forest3D - Generate Populated Outdoor Environments for Gazebo
- Ros2plot - Terminal based topic plots
- Ros2_medkit: API-first diagnostics for ROS 2
- POIROT: a comprehensive profiling and monitoring framework for ROS 2 applications
- A Rust CLI to analyze ROS workspaces and generate offline, static HTML dependency reports
- Announcing iceoryx2 v0.8.0 – The iceoryx2 Book
- Modeling LeKiwi’s omni-base in MuJoCo
- Surround Vision ROS 2: a Vehicle surround-view stack
- Ball-Chasing Quadruped Robot with ROS 2 & Arduino UNO Q
- New packages for Humble Hawksbill
- Phantom Bridge: a new take on ROS real-time data visualization, teleoperation, observability, remote and local debugging
- Space Station OS v0.8.7
- ROS 2 Gazebo Sim Plugin Tutorial Series
- Visual IDE for Teaching ROS 2 on Windows
- Gazebo Plugin Video Tutorial Series
- ROS 2 Gazebo Sim Plugin Tutorial Series
- Best practices for thermal camera intrinsics (FLIR A400) in sensor fusion
- Nav2 virtual layer plugin
- rplidar_ros2_driver: A Modern C++ (C++17) Driver with Lifecycle Support
- LGDXRobot2: An Open-Source ROS 2 Robot with Decent Performance
- Importing PiPER URDF into Isaac_Sim
- ROS 2 Kilted on macOS Apple Silicon — TurtleBot4 + Navigation Stack Working End-to-End
- Artifex: AI-generated URDFs with visual error checking
- Real-Time Cartesian Controller for UR5/UR5e with External Sensor Feedback (ROS 2 Humble, ros2_control)
- UrdfArchitect: A AI-powered visual editor to build robot models without manual XML coding
- POINT-LIVO: POINT-LIO + FAST-LIVO2 with motion deskewing, state estimation
- Tobor: a most versatile open-source robotics system
- WorldGen - Generate Any 3D Scene in Seconds
- Scaling 3D World Models for In-The-Wild Robotic Manipulation
- ROS 2 Cheat Sheet - Clearpath Robotics
- InfiniDepth Model
- AgriLiRa4D: A Multi-Sensor UAV Dataset for Robust SLAM in Challenging Agricultural Fields
- VR-based Teleoperation for Dexterous Manipulation - Control xArm + Inspire Hands with Vive Trackers and Quest Hand Tracking
- GalaxeaVLA: Galaxea’s first VLA release
- What is a PID Controller? (Video)
- Hand-Controlled Robotic Arm.
- LabelAny3D: Label Any Object 3D in the Wild
- YASMIN - Yet Another State MachINe Docs
Got a Minute 
?
Just like everyone else I built a cool ROS tool over the break. It is a fun little script that helps me gather information across the ROS and Gazebo Github orgs. Here is a list of some of the “help wanted” ROS issues that were created or touched over the holidays.
- Help Wanted in ros2/common_interfaces [geometry_msgs] document inertia tensor reference point
- Help Wanted in ros2/ros2_documentation Canonical URL generation logic can lead to incorrect mirror results
- 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/ros2cli Design Reconsideration for
ros2doctor. - Help Wanted in ros2/ros2_documentation Add a page for where things are in the Open Robotics’ ecosystem