ROS News for the week of July 13th, 2026

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ROS News for the week of July 13th, 2026

neo
Yesterday our colleagues at the Neobotics Foundation swung by ROS By-the-Bay for some human versus robot RC car races. If you want to try racing against an autonomous RC car we’ll be at Open Sauce all weekend. If you can’t make it to Open Sauce you can always just build your own.


vpd
Speaking of autonomous driving, our colleagues at Autoware have released a free and open source L2 autonomy stack called Vision Pilot.


GCMJuly26
Autonomous surface finishing (i.e. grinding, sanding, and painting) is huge topic in industrial robotics right now. If this is something you are interested in our next Gazebo Community Meeting will feature Arjun Haridas who built an open source Gazebo plugin that simulates spray painting.


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Our colleagues at AMD just launched a Physical AI hackathon with $30,000 in prizes. The hackathon includes free access to AMD GPUs. If you’re working on a ROS / Gazebo project and could use a bit more compute this is a great opportunity to learn and potentially win big. The hackathon is presently open and submissions are due August 6th!


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Looking for a low-cost but high quality stereo camera for robotics applications? @Vladimir_Privalov has hacked together a ROS 2 node for the PlayStation 5 HD camera. For less than $100 you can pick up a used 1080p stereo camera with an integrated hardware trigger. If you are a student looking to learn about SLAM fundamentals this is a great option.

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Got a minute? :alarm_clock:

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Once a week, the ROS core contributors meet to assign reviewers to all of the incoming PRs in the ros2 GitHub org. We call this meeting “Waffle” (it is a long story). This week, we received close to 50 AI-generated pull requests that weren’t marked as AI-generated.

We have two requests. First, please don’t do this unless you are willing to help us review other incoming PRs and work with us to see the PRs through to the end. Please see this discussion for more context. We’re not against AI-generated PRs, but we have limited bandwidth, and activity like this can make it hard for us to triage and address PRs from actual human beings. The problem has become bad enough that @Andrew_Symington whipped up a new triage board (pictured above) to help us improve the signal-to-noise ratio on incoming PRs.

Second, if you are interested in helping us, and you can spare at least two hours a week to review PRs, we would :heart: love your help! If you want to pitch in, just DM me on Discourse and we can chat about the process and how you can get involved.

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