ROS News for the Week of June 22nd, 2026
Our colleague @tomoyafujita has informed us that Sony’s AI Ace table tennis robot runs ROS 2 under the hood.
It was a busy week in terms of robotics events! I’ve been at Automate in Chicago all week and I met at least a dozen new companies that use ROS. We also hosted a very well attended ROS meetup. ROSCon France was in Paris this week and I hope all the attendees managed to enjoy themselves despite the blistering heat. The deadline for early bird ROSCon Global tickets is fast approaching, with the last day to get a discount ticket being July 12th.
There were quite a few automated coating and surface finishing demos at Automate this year. If you want to brush on your ROS skills in this application domain @arjunkharidas has a great new Gazebo plugin that simulates spray paining applications.
Events
- 2026-06-29 => 2026-07-03 Call for Late Registrations: 3rd Summer School on Systems & Software Eng. for Robotics in Delft
- 2026-07-02 Robot Fringe Festival 2026
- 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
- 2026-08-03 => 2026-08-07 FZI Robotics Summer School 2026 - Apply
- 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
- 2026-09-06 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
- Amazon’s Astro Robot Sound Turns Motion Into Story
- Reservoir acquires Contain to scale agtech startups
- Humanoid maker Agility Robotics to go public through SPAC merger
- Mantis Robotics launches dual-arm, fenceless robot
- Bear Robotics acquires Kinisi Robotics to boost its physical AI capabilities
- Cobot’s Proxie Gen 2 robot adds autotasking, mobile manipulation
- Scale Models of ROS robots
ROS
Sony AI’s Ace (Nature cover, beat a pro table tennis player) — running on ROS 2- Rolling-Bonxai: A rolling voxel grid implementation of Bonxai to handle large maps in ROS 2
- Driveline: browser-based replay for MCAP/rosbag2 with synced video + signals
- Introducing gz_sim_spray_painting_plugin : Simulate spray painting in Gazebo!
- 2D-Scan Merger for ROS 2!
- Autonomous Navigation with LeKiwi and Nav2
- Announcing Gazebo Rotary
- Ros-ws: ROS2 workspace management tool
- New Packages and patch release for Lyrical 2026-06-23
- New packages and patch release for Jazzy Jalisco 2026-06-18
- Mobile_Robot_URDF Maker v4.0 is here!
- Lightweight zero-dependency Occupancy Grid Editor
- Draft REP 158: OpenUSD Conventions for Simulation Asset Interoperability in Open Source Robotics
- ROS 2 Studio Update
- A tutorial to make your quadruped robot on ROS
- Interop SIG, 02 July 2026: Natural-Language Control of Open-RMF Fleets via the Model Context Protocol (MCP)
- Tightly-Coupled Bimanual Control - Safe and Stable Dual Arm Transport
- Rclnodejs 2.1: Native ESM for a Web-Native ROS 2 SDK
- Anomaly Detection. Beta testers wanted
- VL53L0X Time-of-Flight sensor as a Nav2 obstacle layer (ESP32 + ROS 2 Humble)
- Autosleep feature: Where is the documentation and how to enable it?
- New release cadence for Gazebo and better alignment with ROS
- Sw2robot — a SolidWorks → URDF exporter with a browser-based editor
- event-triggered MCAP clips from a continuous ROS 2 recording (preroll included)
- Scry — debug your ROS 2 robot from your phone, with an AI assistant
- Ros2probe: observe ROS 2 traffic without the probe effect (swap ros2 → rp)
- ZeroDDS: a pure-Rust RMW for ROS 2 (rc.3), built against 349 real ROS↔DDS pain reports
- A VS Code extension for quickly running ROS 2 launch files, Python nodes, and C++ nodes
- ROS 2 Robot V1.0.0 - A Modern GUI for ROS 2 Workspace Management (Like GitHub Desktop for ROS)
- Dogfooding a local MCP context server for coding agents on a ROS 2 Python repo
- LSEP v0.2 — now a buildable ROS 2 reference implementation: typed lsep_msgs + managed lifecycle node, green CI
- taorobot — a mobile robot stack written from scratch by an actual human as a learning project
- STS3215 pan/tilt + LD19: a no-SDK 3D scanning module for ROS 2 Jazzy
- How to Complicate Saying Hello To Dave
- Measure serialized topic bandwidth and serialization times using ros_babel_fish_tools
- norynth/ros2-bridge — ROS2 fleet management, telemetry & command dispatch
- GitHub - LevinTamir/ros2_closed_loop_ws: ROS 2 workspace for modeling and simulating closed-loop kinematic mechanisms in Gazebo · GitHub
- Space Robotics Workshop @ IROS 2026 (Oct 1st)
- drone_interceptor_prototype · GitHub
- TF2 but Rust
- UNO Q Braccio: Edge Impulse + ROS 2 Controlled Robot Arm with Gazebo Simulation
- ROB 101 Computational Linear Algebra: Mathematics at the Scale of Life
- ROB 201 Calculus for the Modern Engineer
- ETH Zurich Programming for Robotics with ROS
- Visual Inertial Localization and Mapping
- Art Robot navigating Seattle – (Video)
- Thor: DIY 3D Printable Robotic Arm
- Pedro: Pedro the open source project designed with STEM spirit
- RadarGen: Automotive Radar Point Cloud Generation from Cameras
- ScaRF-SLAM: ScaRF-SLAM: A Framework for Globally Consistent Online Visual Dense Reconstruction
- ManyMove: To plan and execute moves with manipulators in ROS 2
- DIYing a Robot Actuator, for Better or Worse
- Visual Inertial Localization and Mapping
- The New Orange Pi 6 Is Way More Powerful Than Your Current SBC