ROS News for the Week of July 6th, 2026
THIS SUNDAY, JULY 12th, is the last day to purchase early bird ROSCon Global tickets. Regular tickets are $150 off, which should cover one night at a hotel or make your workshop effectively free.
The fine folks over at the NeoBotics Foundation are in town for Open Sauce and they’re joining us for ROS By-The-Bay next week. They’re making an open source hardware / software platform for the RoboRacer competition. We’ll be racing cars in the parking lot and having a grand old time.
If you are doing field robotics and need a realistic Gazebo simulation environment this amazing new tool chain should be in your toolbox. The tool can generate a simulation world using free satellite imagery and DEM data.
Robotics Utility Board Interface (RUBI) is a robot data visualizer and control interface. There are a lot of robot data viz tools out there right now but this one includes the ability to send commands and can be installed with a single pip install command.
If RUBI doesn’t do it for you PlotJuggler v. 4.0 is here! 
THIS IS PLOT JUGGLER! It does timeseries! It does 2D data! It does 3D data! It does 4D data! It slices, it dices, and it can be installed via an AppImage, and supports cloud data storage and retrieval along with many more features!
Ever want a tiny desktop model robot? A lot of robotics companies have started handing out scale models of their robots as conference swag. @MoffKalast takes it to the next level by building a WORKING (in the RC car sense) Husarion Lynx robot.
Why buy a robot vacuum when you can build one?! Oomwoo is an open source hardware and software project that aims to build the world’s first fully open robot vacuum.
Events
- 2026-07-16 ROS By-The-Bay July Meetup: Open Sauce Pre-Game w.s.g. NeoBotics Foundation
- We’ll be at Open Sauce hanging out with Neobotics all weekend. Come watch ROS race!
- 2026-07-17 Open Sauce Technology & Creator Festival
- 2026-07-18 => 2026-07-24 ROS Summer School – Hangzhou, China
- 2026-07-29 => 2026-08-04 IEEE RAS Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems in Prague
- 2026-07-29 Gazebo Community Meeting: Simulating Spray Painting in Gazebo
- 2026-08-03 => 2026-08-07 FZI Robotics Summer School 2026 - Apply
- 2026-08-03 筑波大学 ROS Japan Dev会議 Breakout Session 参加登録
- 2026-08-04 => 2026-08-05 ROSCon JP 2026 スポンサーの紹介
- 2026-08-02 Montreal Robotics Summer School
- 2026-08-18 → 2026-08-19 Foxglove Actuate 26
- 2026-08-26 → 2026-08-27 Ruggedize Agricultural Technology & Robotics Conference
- 2026-09-04 Open Ocean Software Community Day UK
- 2026-09-06 Roboracer VTC 2026
- 2026-09-22 => 2026-09-24 Global ROSCon 2026 in Toronto
- 2026-10-27 ==> 2026-10-28 ROSCon España 2026
- 2026-11-05 International Conference on Humanoid Robotics, Innovation & Leadership
- 2026-11-03 ROSCon Italy in Bologna
- 2026-11-25 => 2026-11-26 ROSCon Belgium 2026
News
Welcoming Vicky (VM) Brasseur as Our New OSRF Chief Program Officer- ROS documentation revision notice
- Guidelines for AI-Assisted Contributions in the ROS Project
- D-Robotics has joined the OSRA as a supporting member!
- Gazebo PMC Meeting Minutes 2026-07-06
- Gazebo PMC Meeting Minutes 2026-06-29
- Last Day for ROSCon Global Early Bird Tickets is Sunday, July 12th
- NVIDIA and Hugging Face bring new models and frameworks to LeRobot
- HIVE brings in $15M to build physical AI for industrial machines
- Calling all robotics startups: apply to RoboBusiness Startup Alley
- Luxonis closes Series A round to scale physical AI perception layer
- Reservoir acquires Contain to scale agtech startups
- Mantis Robotics launches dual-arm, fenceless robot – This one of the top 5 coolest things I saw at Automate.
- How Intrinsic eliminates manual robot coding
- Bear Robotics acquires Kinisi Robotics to boost its physical AI capabilities
- Stealth Ukraine Ground Drones Hunt In the Dark
ROS
- gazebo_terrain_generator: A simple tool to generate gazebo terrain using satellite images and DEM data
- Plotjuggler 4 (beta!) is here. Unleashing multi-modal data
- robot-triage: auto-flag failures in rosbags (open source)
- Scale Models of ROS robots
- RUBI (Robot Utility Board Interface) - v2
- oomwoo: Open-source vacuum robot cleaner
- OpenRAL - the agentic harness for physical AI (ROS 2-native)
- VL53L0X Time-of-Flight sensor as a Nav2 obstacle layer (ESP32 + ROS 2 Humble)
- Ros-ws: ROS 2 workspace management tool
- ROS 2 QoS: Why Your Nodes Aren’t Talking (and How to Fix It)
- PID Control, Motion Profiles and ROS Explained
- Update on BAGEL (BAG ExpLoration): What’s New
- Aerial Robotics Meeting - 2nd July 2026 (video)
- Interop SIG, 02 July 2026: Natural-Language Control of Open-RMF Fleets via the Model Context Protocol (MCP) (video)
- Interop SIG, 7 May 2026: Open-RMF Upcoming Zone Feature (video)
- Draft REP 0156:2026
ros2logCommand Line Interface - Call for Discussion - Real-time robot dashboards in React without a separate visualization server
- Showcase: Beam AgroBot V2 – Autonomous Agricultural Robot Built with ROS 2, Nav2, MoveIt 2 and RealSense
- 20 parallel courses available for 2026 ROS Summer School-Hangzhou
- AffectGuard-HRI: emotion-aware robot behavior with a non-overridable safety envelope
- Midwest United States ROS 2 mirror
- Does anyone else struggle to get accurate inertia and mass values for 3D-printed parts in sim?
- ROS 2 node for PlayStation 5 HD camera
- Autonomous Long-Horizon Whole-body Task: A BT-Based Whole-body VLA Framework
- Announcing ros-env: Access ROS 2 messages from Rust with just Cargo
- New packages for Humble Hawksbill 2026-07-02
- kc_vision — Autonomous ground robot with SLAM, Nav2
- Embeddable React telemetry components — a browser ground station for MAVROS
- urdf_validator v1.0 — physics-aware URDF validation
- ros2-jazzy is now available on Homebrew!
- A Standard Interface from LLM to Robot Actions
- Offboard Control with PX4 & ROS 2 (Micro XRCE-DDS)
- Nav2 BT Editor: a VS Code extension for editing and previewing Nav2 behavior trees
- sdf2map: Convert Gazebo (Harmonic) SDF worlds into PCD point cloud maps for NDT localization and Nav2 occupancy grids
- pointcloud-map-gui: Point cloud to ROS2 occupancy grid map GUI exporter
- Release v1.0.0-rc.5 · zero-objects/zero-dds
- PiBob low cost robot
- New Release: YASMIN (Yet Another State MachINe)
- tile_map_server: Sliding-window tiled map server for large-area Nav2 navigation (ROS 2 Jazzy)
- jsk_visualization: jsk visualization ROS 2 packages
- 12 free browser-based tools for URDF and simulation work
- SW2GZ — export SolidWorks assemblies straight to ROS 2 + Gazebo
- First They Laugh, Then They Fight, Then You Win, Open-Source Robotics
- ros2_ekf_fusion: 5-state Extended Kalman Filter fusing wheel odometry + IMU for mobile-robot localization
- Lookahead for Speed Limit Filter by dhruvtya
Jobs
Got a Minute? 
The ROS 2 Documentation is under heavy construction right now. We could really use a few more reviewers to take a look at the big changes coming to the docs.
Bonus
My secret side project, the Open Source Hardware Association, just wrapped up a Phase 2 NSF POSE grant that examined how to properly build and share open hardware medical equipment. We’re presently holding a conference in San Francisco to wrap things up. While not strictly robotics, there are some real gems in there related to topics like quality assurance for open hardware devices, the use of open hardware in science education in Latin America, and free and open source hardware MRIs (and that’s just the first day!).