ROS News for the Week of March 23rd, 2026
The ROSCon Global 2026 call for sponsors is out. We also updated the website with additional venue information.
If you are planning to submit a ROSCon work shop proposal the deadline is coming up quick, April 5th, to be exact!
On the event front ROSCon Croatia is scheduled for Monday and from what I hear is sold out! Over the weekend we have another Nigerian ROS meetup on deck, along with meetups in the Netherlands, Germany, and Poland.
Google Summer of Code project proposals are due on March 31st! If you would like to intern this summer with one of our talented mentors it is now or never. You should have time over the weekend to put together a solid proposal.
The ESP32 is a $5 micro processor with built-in wi-fi support and you can find it in a lot of great open hardware projects. I really love this set of projects that use the chip to build a low-cost DIY ROS robot that uses ROS Control.
TermViz 2 is a ROS 2 port of TermViz, a visualization utility built for the terminal. It renders maps, laser scans, point clouds, poses, paths, images, and markers directly in the terminal using half-block characters, with support for teleoperation, pose publishing, and real-time data plotting.
Events
- 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
- 2026-03-31 OSRF Google Summer of Code Prosals Due
- 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
- 2026-04-09 Pittsburgh Physical AI Happy Hour
- 2026-04-21 Accelerating Robotics Development with Qt Robotics Framework
- 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
- 2026-06-22 => 2026-06-26 iRoboCity2030 Summer School 2026: ROS 2, AI and Field Robotics
- 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
- 2026-08-18 → 2026-08-19 Foxglove Actuate 26
- 2026-08-26 → 2026-08-27 Ruggedize Agricultural Technology & Robotics Conference
- 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
- ROSCon Global 2026: Call for Sponsors
- 2026-03-31 OSRF Google Summer of Code Prosals Due
- Gazebo PMC Meeting Minutes 2026-03-16
- iRoboCity2030 Summer School 2026: ROS 2, AI and Field Robotics
- RT Corporation becomes the first Japanese company to join the Open Source Robotics Alliance (OSRA) as a Silver Member
- AI Native Robotics 3D Camera: LooperRobotics Insight 9 r
- This New Spatial Camera Is Perfect for Robots
- Invitation: Multi-Robot Systems Summer School 2026 (Prague)
- Rockwell Automation’s Ryan Gariepy to Expand Autonomous Solutions Beyond Material Handling: Pros to Know Award
- Melania Trump wants a robot to homeschool your child
- Lucid Bots raises $20M to keep up with demand for its window-washing drones
- Amazon just bought a startup making kid-size humanoid robots
- Videos: Bipedal Robot, NASA Robots, Aibo app, and More
- VDMA says Version 3.0 of VDA 5050 will help mobile robot fleets scale
- 3 robotics trends from NVIDIA GTC 2026
- Unitree IPO shows a real hardware business, but the humanoid case is still early
- Basler and Orbbec partner for 3D vision systems for mobile robots
- Lucid Bots raises Series B funding as operator network hits $75M in revenue
- Amazon acquires humanoid developer Fauna Robotics
- Oxa closes Series D funding to bring industrial mobility automation to market
- Inside the new ‘Living Lab’ advancing agricultural robotics
ROS
FusionCore, a ROS 2 Jazzy sensor fusion package- termviz2: Terminal data visualization software for robotics powered by Rust, fed by ROS 2
- Gaussian RIO 2.0 - now in C++ and more ROS friendly
- dynamic-3d-object-removal: Numpy-only dynamic object removal for LiDAR point clouds.
- ground_segmentation: A C++ library for ground segmentation of a pointcloud - paper - ROS 2 wrapper
- ESP32_ws: Esp32 firmware for 2 wheel differential drive robot which communicates with the Hardware Interface of ros2_control
- diffdrive_esp32: A ros2_control Hardware Interface for an esp32 based Differential Drive Robot
- Rocky’s Open-Source Build Thread (AI for Industry Challenge)
- ROS 2 Studio — GUI tool for performance monitoring, bag operations and system dashboard
- Handling missing command interfaces in read_state_from_command_interface
- Remote Control of Robotic Arms – Using a Standard Gamepad
- Polka: A unified node for all pointcloud pre-processing/merging
- Compositional C++ log framework for ROS 2
- KUKA LBRs (iiwa and med) now on RoboStack
- ROSDeck: configurable split-pane ROS 2 operator panel for Android (iOS coming soon)
- ROS 2 UWB Localization Framework with Realistic Noise Modeling and Benchmarking
- Weekend/Evenings robotics architecture reviews
- DHCalc – Symbolic Denavit–Hartenberg Calculator in C++
- ROS Lyrical Release Working Group
- New packages for Humble Hawksbill 2026-03-20
- 4D Radar-Inertial Odometry based on Gaussian Modeling and Multi-Hypothesis Scan Matching
- The AI For Industry Challenge (Video)
- Gazebo Sim Plugins Made Easy
- nix-ros-overlay: ROS overlay for the Nix package manager
- ROS 2 with Nix
- Autoware vision pilot
- astroviz: ROS 2 package implementing a teleoperation interface using QT
- ardupilot_autonomy: ardupilot based drone flight software
- gnssplusplus-library: Modern C++ GNSS Positioning Library
- Release notes for FreeCAD 1.1
- OpenArm: A fully open-source humanoid arm for physical AI research and deployment in contact-rich environments.
- fmrico’s book_on ROS 2
- Autonomous Vehicle Control Beginners Guide
- ctlio_ros2: ROS 2 package for Continuous-Time LiDAR–Inertial Odometry based on a cumulative B-spline on the SO(3) Lie group.
- Weekly Robotics #353
- nvitop: An interactive NVIDIA-GPU process viewer and beyond
- LEGO-SLAM: LEGO-SLAM: Language-Embedded Gaussian Optimization SLAM
Jobs
Got a Minute? 
We have a few new issues in Launch that could use some attention. We’re always looking for new contributors so why not give them a shot!
- Autotranslate between launch formats · Issue #957 · ros2/launch
- YAML: Allow use of typed values (boolean & number) instead of requiring strings for everything · Issue #955 · ros2/launch
- YAML frontend: support direct use of key:value dict for args, params, etc instead of lists of name:+value: dicts · Issue #954 · ros2/launch