ROS News for the week of March 9th, 2026
The call for proposals for Global ROSCon 2026 in Toronto is out. Key dates you need to be aware of:
- 2026-03-22T00:00:00Z Diversity scholarship applications are due! This is the only scholarship we offer, so plan accordingly
- 2026-04-05T00:00:00Z Workshops proposals are due.
- 2026-04-26T00:00:00Z Presentation proposals are due.
NVIDIA GTC is next week. On 2026-03-19T01:00:00Z→2026-03-19T04:00:00Z we’ll a few hundred people gathering at Circuit Launch for our monthly ROS By the Bay meetup. We’ve got an amazing lineup of speakers and demos planned. There are a bunch of other robotics and physical AI meetups planned for throughout the week that are listed in the events section below.
@dmitri_manajev has released a complete ROS 2 setup for the SO-101 arm. This project takes the existing SO-101 project from HuggingFace and brings in a full suite of ROS based tools and ROS control so you get the best of both worlds.
Check out this slick open-source tactile and contact sensing setup for robotic grippers that uses a Teensy micro-controller. The setup is compatible with the S0-100 arm.
We love this simple little web app that allows you to visualize uncertainty propagation in your robot odometry. This is a great little learning and debugging tool that you should probably bookmark.
Our Waffle Meeting is where the ROS 2 core contributors meet once a week to discuss the recent issues and pull requests that were sent to the project. We’re in the process of re-vamping our Waffle meeting to make it more community friendly (more details should be out in the next few weeks). As part of that revamp process @mjcarroll vibe-coded a new Waffle dashboard and a leader board for the ROS project.
Events
- 2026-03-14 Hackathon Funding the Commons SF
- 2026-03-16 ROS Lyrical Release Working Group
- 2026-03-18 Interoperability Framework: Working Group Formation
- 2026-03-18 ROS By-the-Bay NVIDIA GTC Special Edition
- 2026-03-18 ROS Ukraine Meetup
- 2026-03-20 ROS Meetup Moscow 2026. Remote participation is possible
- 2026-03-20 HACK2026 ETH Zurich Robot Hackathon
- 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
- 2026-03-28 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
- 2026-03-31 ROS Netherlands Meetup at Saxion University
- 2026-04-14 ROS Meetup Malmö Sweden
- 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
- 2026-06-21 => 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
- 2026-11-25 => 2026-11-26 ROSCon Belgium 2026
News
- Call for Proposals: Global ROSCon 2026 in Toronto
- ROSCon Belgium 2026
- Dexory Opens 50,000 Sq Ft US Headquarters in Nashville
- Roboto Selected for the Physical AI Fellowship by AWS & NVIDIA
- 2026-04-15 ROS Breakfast Meetup at MODEX 2026
- A Day at ROSCon Japan 2025 – What It’s Like to Attend as a Robotics Engineer
- A Proven Path to Production Robots
- Weekly Robotics #351
- Robot Videos: Modular Robots, Robot Pandas, and More
- Oxa closes Series D funding to bring industrial mobility automation to market
- Rhoda AI exits stealth with $450M to train robots from video
- iRobot is bringing the Roomba Mini to the U.K. and Europe
- Teradyne Robotics sues Chinese cobot maker over UR software
- OpenAI robotics head resigns over Pentagon deal
- Humanoid developer Agility Robotics rebrands
- Simbe Tally shelf-scanning robot achieves UL 3300 certification
- Rivian spin-out Mind Robotics raises $500M for industrial AI-powered robots
- Canopii looks to succeed where past indoor farms have not
- Qualcomm’s partnership with Neura Robotics is just the beginning
ROS
Open-source tactile/shear telemetry + contact flags / grip scoring for grippers - End-to-End Imitation Learning for SO-101 with ROS 2
- SE(2) Odometry Uncertainty Propagation
- ROS 2 Waffle Dashboard
- 2026-03-16 ROS Lyrical Release Working Group
- PlotJuggler Bridge Released
- LSEP: Open protocol for standardized robot-to-human state communication (light + sound + motion)
- Rocky’s Open-Source Build Thread
- Hephaes: Open-source ROS1/2 Logs to Parquet/TFRecord converter
- Is there a working group for maintaining ROS 2-based robots in industry?
- Asia friendly Gazebo contributors meeting
- New packages for Kilted Kaiju 2026-03-12
- Tree-sitter Grammar for ROS Interface files
- Carto a small Zenoh debugging tool we built internally
- ROS2 interface to Doly Robot
- I’ve been reverse engineering the environment for rapid testing, what I’ve learned
- ros2_info — A fastfetch-like system info tool for ROS 2
- Control NERO’s 7-DoF Effortlessly with MoveIt 2 (Part I)
- ROS 2 Rust Meeting: March 2026
- “You can’t fork a robot (yet)”
- pal-robotics/pal_mjlab: PAL Robotics’ robots in mjlab
- ROS 2 meets OpenClaw
- Mercury is a transforming drone anyone can build
- IRVLUTD/L2G: From Local Matches to Global Masks: Novel Instance Detection in Open-World Scenes
- ArUco nano, a lightweight implementation of the ArUco that’s up to 6.5x faster than standard OpenCV ArUco.
- Cooperative Human Aware Robot Navigation (CoHAN 2.0) - source
- A complete Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) framework for WAM-V Autonomous Surface Vessels
- AgenticROS: The agentic AI for robotics
- ROS 2 on MacOS
- SBEM Robot Source Code
Jobs
Got a Minute? 
Next week we’re kicking off our 2026 Google Summer of Code program. If you are looking for a summer internship and would like to contribute to one of the OSRA’s projects please take a look at our project list. We’ll be posting more information on how to apply on Monday.