ROS News for the Week of May 18th, 2026

Community News
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ROS News for the Week of May 18th, 2026

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:tada: ROS 2 Lyrical Luth is here!

Read the full release notes here, and snag your swag here!

You can read our full release announcement here.

Big thanks to all of our contributors, maintainers, testers, build farmers, OSRA members, and especially our ROS Boss @sloretz, and our infra lead @cottsay.

We’re going to take a long weekend break and get right back to it working on ROS 2 Makoa Mata-Mata! :woman_surfing:


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The ROS events calendar is absolutely packed for the next couple of weeks! This week announced our next Gazebo Community Meeting, a ROS meetup at ICRA in Vienna, and our ROS meetup at Automate in Chicago. There’s also a ton of other great events happening in the next few weeks.


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@msadowski has put together a great tutorial on integrating the LeKiwi Robot, ROS Control, Foxglovel, Pixi, and a Steam Deck as a teleop controller that’s worth a read.


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The team behind the Open Arm open-source hardware and software project has taken that work a step farther and is now offering an open source bi-manual mobile manipulator platform called Mobile OpenArm with a price tag under US$19,000. It is unclear right now if the platform will also be a fully open hardware platform.

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We’ve still got a bit of a hang over from the Test and Tutorial Party and I sure there’s content on docs.ros.org that needs updating. If you catch anything we could really use a PR, or even better a PR review, on the docs repo.

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I wanted to clarify about the tutorial on integrating the LeKiwi Robot, ROS Control, Foxglove, Pixi, and a Steam Deck as a teleop controller that’s worth a read. - It was Aditya Kamath (@adityakamath ) who wrote the blog post and is pushing this integration forward; I was just a messenger :slight_smile:

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What an exciting week for the ROS community! Congratulations to the entire team on the release of ROS 2 Lyrical Luth — a huge milestone made possible by the contributors, maintainers, testers, and the tireless work of @sloretz and @cottsay. Well deserved!

The events calendar is looking incredible — from the ROS meetup at ICRA in Vienna to ROSCon 2026 in Toronto, there’s so much to look forward to. The Mobile OpenArm bi-manual platform at under $19K is particularly exciting for accessible open-source robotics hardware.

Also love seeing the creativity in the community this week — GPU-accelerated kinematics with CUDA, the SteamDeck LeKiwi teleop setup, and the browser-based OLO platform all stand out. The ROS ecosystem just keeps growing stronger. Looking forward to what Makoa Mata-Mata brings!

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Thanks for the clarification. Perhaps I am speaking out of turn here, but I believe @scastro and a few others are also working on a few LeRobot related projects. It would be really great if we could collect all of these projects in a single spot easier access and higher visibility.

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Thanks for pointing this out, Kat!

Indeed, it’s more the “few others” doing the actual work (mostly @francocipollone @Juliaj @Yadunund) and me doing a bunch of finger wagging, but we’ve been putting together an “official” reference application for the SO101 arms in GitHub - ros-physical-ai/demos · GitHub. We would be super happy to consolidate contributions as it makes sense.

For example, we did nothing with the mobile base (no LeKiwi on our end), right now are only using leader arms and soon an IK based keyboard app for teleop, and no Foxglove live visualization. On the other hand, I noticed you made your own hardware interface although we’re actively working on making GitHub - JafarAbdi/ros2_so_arm: ROS 2 packages for SO-ARM100 and SO-ARM101 arms. · GitHub and GitHub - JafarAbdi/feetech_ros2_driver: ros2_control hardware interface for Feetech Servos · GitHub the official drivers for these arms/motors.

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I still don’t have a great answer for where all of this LeRobot stuff should land. I don’t know if it is fully baked enough to land in the docs just yet and on the other hand Discourse is a bit ephemeral. Perhaps we need some sort of “Awesome” ROS / LeRobot repo under a PAI SIG Github repo.

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@scastro I did see the repositories you shared, but at the time, it was limited to the motors’ position control mode, which works for the SO101 arms, but not for wheeled robots. I don’t know if things have changed. Happy to contribute (if/when I get the time) if you are working on making them “official” drivers.