ROS News for the Week of March 31st, 2026
Next week is light on events, but the following weeks are jam packed! There is a ROS Meetup in Malmo on the 14th of April, a ROS Meetup at Modex on the 15th, and ROS By-The-Bay on the 16th. Links are down in the events section.
ROSCon Global workshop proposals are due on April 5th, just two days from now!The submissions deadline to talk at ROSCon Global is a little over three weeks away.
We’re starting the release process for ROS 2 Lyrical Luth, our next ROS 2 LTS release. The release timeline has been published and the RMW feature freeze is on April 6th, 2026. If you want to pitch in consider joining our ROS Lyrical Release Working Group.
This week I met with the fine folks at Innate.bot who are building a very awesome homage to the Turtlebot and the LeRobot SO-101. They’re holding a hackathon at Y-Combinator next Saturday.
Our colleagues at Robotis, the makers of the much-loved Dynamixel servos, have released a new 5-finger, 20 DOF HX5-D20 hand with ROS 2 support that looks incredible.
MRReP is a mixed reality-based hand-drawn reference path editing Interface for mobile robot navigation that runs on ROS.. The demo video makes it look like a great approach to both debugging and programming mobile robots. [source code] [video]
Events
- 2026-04-09 Pittsburgh Physical AI Happy Hour
- 2026-04-11 Innate Bot Robot Hackathon at YCombinator
- 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
- 2026-04-13 Cloud Robotics WG Meeting – Custom Capabilities in Transitive Robotics
- 2026-04-16 ROS By-The-Bay April 2026 @ Beckhoff
- 2026-05-21 Second ROS Meetup Karlsruhe
- 2026-04-21 Accelerating Robotics Development with Qt Robotics Framework
- 2026-04-25 Robots on Ice 2026
- 2026-04-26 Global ROSCon 2026 in Toronto Proposals Due
- 2026-04-29 => 2026-04-30 ROS Meetup MedellÃn Colombia
- 2026-04-03 TEROS: Texas ROS Meetup at UT Austin
- 2026-05-03 Robotics Meetup Bremen
- 2026-05-04 OpenCV-SID Conference On Computer Vision & AI
- 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
Call for Proposals: Global ROSCon 2026 in Toronto
OSRA Projects Documentation Overhaul: New Information Architecture Design Complete- Proposal for a new Gazebo Release Cadence
- Gazebo PMC Meeting Minutes 2026-03-30
- Two weeks remain to join the AI for Industry Challenge
- OSRA TGC meeting minutes for January, 2026
- OSRA TGC meeting minutes for December, 2025
- OSRA TGC meeting minutes for October, 2025
- Weekly Robotics #354
- Building From Source Shouldn’t Be This Hard
- Robotics Meetup Bremen - every 1st Thursday of a month
- Change of co-leads of Aerial ROS community group
- Interop SIG, 2 April 2026: OpenRobOps
- Asia friendly Gazebo contributors meeting
- Announcing MoveIt Pro 9 with ROS 2 Jazzy Support
- ICRA 2026 Workshops with Travel Support Grants
- Failed AI tractor company lays off all employees, abandons Bay Area HQ
- PickNik Robotics gives MoveIt Pro 9.0 enhanced perception-to-motion, teleop capabilities
- Saronic raises $1.75B to build autonomous ships at scale
- Shield AI raises $2B for defense drone development, to acquire Aechelon
- Icarus Robotics to test its free-flying robot in the ISS with Voyager
- PDW raises over $110M for its drone-based defense systems
- FedEx chooses partnerships over proprietary tech for its automation strategy
- Physical Intelligence is reportedly in talks to raise $1B, again
ROS
Lyrical Luth Release Timeline- Upcomming RMW ROS 2 Lyrical Luth Feature Freeze - April 6th, 2026
- ROS Lyrical Release Working Group
- MRReP: Mixed Reality-based Hand-drawn Reference Path Editing Interface for Mobile Robot Navigation - code - video
- New 5-finger, 20 DOF HX5-D20 hand with ROS 2
- so101-ros2-behaviors: ROS 2 behavior-based control for the SO-101 robotic arm using IMU-driven interaction
- Terminal PCL Visualizer
- VAMP: Vector Accelerated Motion Planner
- AgenticROS: Connects ROS with OpenClaw, Claude, and Google Gemini
- gz_sim_led_plugin: Simulate LEDs for your robots in Gazebo! – GZ PR
- sesame-robot: An open and affordable mini quadruped robot based on ESP32
- RoboManipBaselines: various imitation learning methods and benchmark environments for robotic manipulation
- reBot-DevArm: Open Source Robotic Arm for All Developers
- Open3D: A Modern Library for 3D Data Processing
- openMVG: open Multiple View Geometry library
- Rocky’s Open-Source Build Thread (AI for Industry Challenge)
- Rapid deployment of OpenClaw and GraspGen crawling system
- Interactive GUI toolkit for robotics visualization
- Two Weeks of Camera Calibration: Turning Pixels Into Trust
- Astryin: A Post-Mortem Analysis & Visualization Toolkit for Nav2
- On message standardization (and a call for participation)
- Detailed Standards for REP-2026-04
- Portable simulation world bundle
- TurtleBot4 Navigation Tuning Result
- Compositional C++ log framework for ROS 2
- RFC: Open standard for robot-to-human light signaling
- Turtlebot 3 Deep Reinforcement Learning Navigation
- Real-time Nav2 parameter tuning GUI
- Rewire — stream ROS 2 topics to Rerun with zero ROS 2 build dependencies
- ROSDeck: configurable split-pane ROS 2 operator panel for Android
- Energy-Efficient Autonomous Navigation Benchmarking
- New packages for Humble Hawksbill 2026-03-29
- Robot Transformational Motion Visualizer
- FusionCore, which is a ROS 2 Jazzy sensor fusion package
- PiBot low cost ROS robot
- Launch-plus: Bazel-like selective builds for ROS 2 that works with your existing project, today
- Benchmarking Full-Stack ROS 2 Simulation Platforms for Mobile Robots
- Articulated Robotics: How to add Battery Monitoring to any robot (Video)
- 4D Radar-Inertial Odometry Based on Gaussian Modeling and Multi-Hypothesis Scan Matching - source
- ROS 2 with Nix
Jobs
Got a Minute? 
Here are a couple of recent issues that could use some attention.
- Proposal: Expose
is_data_validAPI for Loaned/Zero-Copy Messages · Issue #3119 · ros2/rclcpp - Update classes to use gz::utils::UniqueImplPtr · Issue #603 · gazebosim/gz-sensors
- Support uniform tag for skeletal animations in elements (DAE/BVH) · Issue #3440 · gazebosim/gz-sim
