ROS News for the Week of March 16th, 2026
This week we added ROSCon Spain and ROSCon UK to the regional ROSCon mix. We’ve also have ROS meetups planned next week in Heilbronn and Nigeria along with a Gazebo Community Meeting.
We’re planning a ROS Breakfast at Modex in Atlanta this April but you must RSVP by March 30th.
It is that time of year! If you want to come intern with our wonderful core developers consider proposing a project for the OSRF’s 2026 Google Summer of Code program.
Our colleagues at JdeRobot and RoboPlan also have GSoC programs planned for 2026.
The CFP for ROSCon Global 2026 in Toronto is now open!
@adityakamath has put together a great blog post on wiring up ROS 2 Control for the LeKiwi mobile robotics platform.
Check out this slick little drone project, Simultaneous VSLAM with two drones, using PX4 autopilot, ORB-SLAM3 and COVINS agent.
Events
- 2026-03-22 ROSCon Global 2026 Diversity Scholarships Due
- 2026-03-22 Seeed 2026 Embodied AI Hackathon in Santa Clara
- 2026-03-23 ROS Heilbronn Meetup at Bildungscampus
- 2026-03-25 Gazebo Community Meeting
- 2026-03-28 ROS Naija Meetup Nigeria
- 2026-03-30 Odense Robotics and Entrepreneurship Summer School Application Due
- 2026-03-30 ROSCon Croatia
- 2026-03-30 Cracow Robotics & AI Meetup
- 2026-03-30 Autonomous Driving Meetup in Munich
- 2026-03-31 ROS Netherlands Meetup at Saxion University
- 2026-04-14 ROS Meetup Malmö Sweden
- 2026-04-15 ROS Breakfast at Modex (RSVP by 2026-03-30)
- 2026-04-17 Intrinsic AI for Industry Challenge Deadline – More details
- 2026-04-26 Global ROSCon 2026 in Toronto Proposals Due
- 2026-04-29 => 2026-04-30 ROS Meetup Medellín Colombia
- 2026-04-03 TEROS: Texas ROS Meetup at UT Austin
- 2026-05-03 Robotics Meetup Bremen
- 2026-05-04 => 2026-05-08 SPACERAISE Space Robotics Summer School
- 2026-05-17 ROBORACER @ ICRA 2026
- 2026-05-21 Second ROS Meetup Karlsruhe
- 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
- 2026-05-25 Toronto Robotics Community Event
- 2026-06-21 => 2026-06-26 RPL Summer school in robotics, perception and learning, Stockholm, Sweden.
- 2026-06-22 => 2026-06-25 ROSCon France in Paris
- 2026-07-02 Robot Fringe Festival 2026
- 2026-07-17 Open Sauce Technology & Creator Festival – We’re putting together a booth with OpenCV and OSHWA, if you want to demo your ROS robot, reach out.
- 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
- 2026-08-05 => 2026-08-06 ROSCon JP 2026
- 2026-08-02 Montreal Robotics Summer School
- 2026-09-22 => 2026-09-24 Global ROSCon 2026 in Toronto
- 2026-10-27 => 2026-10-28 ROSCon España Valencia
- 2026-11-25 => 2026-11-26 ROSCon Belgium 2026
News
- Call for Proposals: Global ROSCon 2026 in Toronto
- OSRF Google Summer of Code 2026
- JdeRobot Google Summer of Code 2026
- RoboPlan Google Summer of Code 2026
- Save the date for the Second ROSCon UK!
- Community meeting: Gazebo Sim Plugins Made Easy
- ROS PMC Minutes for March 17, 2026
- Olive Robotics receives Outstanding Startup Award at German Robotics Conference in Cologne
- ROS PMC Minutes for March 10, 2026
- Amazon acquires robotic doorstep delivery provider RIVR
- Ottobot makes deliveries at remote mine village in Australia
- KEWAZO raises funding to accelerate LIFTBOT deployment in heavy industry
- Employees had to restrain a dancing humanoid robot after it went wild at a California restaurant
- Gecko Robotics lands the largest US Navy robotics deal yet
ROS
ROS 2 UWB Localization Framework with Realistic Noise Modeling and Benchmarking- PlotJuggler Bridge Released
- drone_multislam_orb3slam: Simultaneous VSLAM with two drones, using PX4 autopilot, ORB-SLAM3 and COVINS agent.
- Wiring up ROS 2 Control for LeKiwi
- Rocky’s Open-Source Build Thread (AI for Industry Challenge)
- Energy-Efficient Autonomous Navigation Benchmarking
- Gazebo Jetty Server Only installation for Ubuntu
- Occupancy grids, point clouds and meshes.. oh my!
- Mastering Nero – MoveIt2 Part II
- Systematic approach for tuning Nav2 planners and controllers?
- NWO Robotics API
pip install nwo-robotics - Built a Python SDK to run 10k headless sims without touching Kubernetes
- Real-time Raspberry Pi ROS 2 image updated for Jazzy and 24.04
- Introducing the Connext Robotics Toolkit for ROS 2
- Rewire — stream ROS 2 topics to Rerun with zero ROS 2 build dependencies
- Launch-plus: Bazel-like selective builds for ROS 2 that works with your existing project, today
- ROS 2 Blueprint Studio: Visual Node Editor & Boilerplate Generator
- mcp-ros2-logs — let AI agents debug your ROS 2 logs across nodes
- Voxel Grid-based Humanoid Locomotion and Local-navigation across 3D Constrained Terrains
- End-to-end pipeline converting generative videos to humanoid robot motions
- Concrete multi-agent path planning enabling kinodynamically aggressive maneuvers – (Video)
- Install Newton via conda-forge using pixi!
- Python sample codes and documents about Autonomous vehicle control algorithm
- Calibrating a monocular camera for the LeKiwi robot using ROS 2
- A simple LiDAR odometry method reducing the complexity and configuration burden of localization algorithm
- SLAM Handbook: From Localization and Mapping to Spatial Intelligence
- Newton Adds Contact-Rich Manipulation and Locomotion Capabilities for Industrial Robotics
- Open_Duck_Mini: Making a mini version of the BDX droid
- vision_pilot: Free self-driving car stack
- Weekly Robotics #352
- LooperRobotics Insight 9, an AI native robotics camera
- LP-MPPI: Low-Pass Filtering for Efficient Model Predictive Path Integral Control
- FORM: Fixed-Lag Odometry with Reparative Mapping utilizing Rotating LiDAR Sensors – source
- Roboplan Release 0.2.0
Jobs
Got a Minute 
Here are few open issues for the Gazebo project: