ROS News for the Week of May 25th, 2026
ICRA 2026 in Vienna kicks off next Monday! Myself and @mrpollo will be there and we’ve got a ROS Meetup scheduled for Tuesday night (June 2nd) and a PX4 / Dronecode Social planned for Thursday night (June 4th). I’ll be handing out Lyrical stickers and if you want to set up a time to chat just DM me on Discourse. We’ve also got an open thread for organizing smaller-scale meetings and paper / presentation shout outs.
Phase 1 of the Intrinsic AI for Industry Challenge has wrapped up! We’ve gone from about a 1000 people to just 31 teams who will move to trying their hand on real-world hardware. Congratulations to all of the teams who took part in the challenge. It’s been great seeing people work together to solve a really challenging problem.
@skye.galaxy, one of our ROS 2 comitters from Polymath Robotics has an excellent deep dive on the development process for the new Callback Group Executor in ROS Lyrical. The new CBG executor reduces compute overhead substantially in certain situations that are often encountered on embedded platforms. The post does a great job of explaining how ROS 2 executors work, and the amount of effort required to verify both their correctness and performance.
I was super busy last weekend helping organize Open Hardware Summit in Berlin last weekend. One of the big news items is that Seeed Studio has fully certified their reBot leader / follower arm as open source hardware (overall specs here). The reason this is important is that open source software licenses, like Apache, don’t exactly work well for physical objects, and there are better alternatives out there. If you want to try one out Seeed is holding a meetup in Munich next weekend.
RCLNodeJS 2.0, part of the RobotWebTools family of utilities, just dropped and it supports Lyrical out of the box. If you are looking to add a web interface to a ROS project this is your best and fastest way to get it done.
Events
- 2026-06-02 ROS Meetup @ ICRA 2026
- 2026-06-03 MoveIt Pro Works Here: Inventia Life Science Develops LIGŌ 3
- 2026-06-04 Dronecode Social @ ICRA 2026
- 2026-06-07 Robotics Builders Meetup: Hands-on with reBot Arm Tickets
- 2026-06-18 Physical AI Happy Hour: Seattle
- 2026-06-20 Robotic Agents Hackathon in Milan
- 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
- 2026-06-23 ROS Automate Meetup in Chicago
- 2026-06-25 ROS-Industrial Consortium Americas 2026 Annual Meeting
- 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
- 2026-08-04 => 2026-08-05 ROSCon JP 2026 スポンサーの紹介
- 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
- 2026-09-06 Roboracer VTC 2026
- 2026-09-22 => 2026-09-24 Global ROSCon 2026 in Toronto
- 2026-10-27 ==> 2026-10-28 ROSCon España 2026
- 2026-11-05 International Conference on Humanoid Robotics, Innovation & Leadership
- 2026-11-25 => 2026-11-26 ROSCon Belgium 2026
News
AIC Qualification Phase Results & Advancing Teams- Robot Hands Are Getting Better - by Chris Paxton
- Pre-announcing ROSCon China 2026
- Call for Proposals: PX4 Developer Summit @ Open Source Summit Europe 2026
- Former NASA Robotics Chief: America is building the wrong kind of robots
- Precision Agriculture Tech Helps Fertilizer Shortages
- The evolution of cobots in metal fabrication and construction
- Robotics Summit keynote to present open foundation for AI-powered robots
- Airbnb host alleges damages after SF startup tests robot indoors
- Waymo’s newest robotaxi is Chinese-made, built to make money, and now accepting riders
ROS
- Polymath Robotics: The Evolution of Execution Management in rclcpp
- OpenCV 5 Preview (Video)
- Introducing Hiroz
- Rclnodejs 2.0.0 — typed Web SDK for ROS 2, ready for Lyrical
- AgenticROS: Connects ROS with OpenClaw, Claude (code, desktop, dispatch), and Google Gemini
- reBot Arm B601: Fully Open-Source 6+1 DoF Robotic Arm Kit
- NASA Copilot 4.7.1 released, a stream-based runtime-verification framework for generating hard real-time C code.
- Lyrical is now on RoboStack!
- MR-SLAM: mixed-reality supervision for multi-robot mapping
- ICRA 2026 in Vienna Open Thread
- runtime_integrity v0.3-alpha: Turning command-to-physical execution consistency into standard ROS diagnostics
- Jazzy tutorial docker container
- Introducing Vulcanexus HRI: Human-Robot Interaction for ROS 2
- Embodied Intelligence Upgraded: Self-Improving Robot Policies via RISE World Model Reasoning
- ORB-SLAM3 Extension: Real-Time Sparse Map to Occupancy Grid (.yaml/.pgm) for ROS 2 Navigation
- ROS 2 URDF Mesh File Types
- Post-Qualification Contribution: Coding a Classical Robot Controller in the Age of Coding Agents, an Honest Assessment
- Connext Robotics Toolkit for ROS Lyrical Luth is now available
- ROS 2 UWB Localization Framework with Realistic Noise Modeling and Benchmarking
- Built a browser-based URDF playground for ROS developers
- 10 Year History of ROS on the GoPiGo3 Platform
- Introducing Mobile OpenArm Open Source & ROS 2 supported
- Build a MuJoCo + ROS2 Robotic Arm Workflow for Embodied AI
- Lifecycle (managed) nodes: why, what, and how. With practical examples
- JAX implementation of multi-agent RL (MAPPO) for safe self-driving under pedestrian behavioral uncertainty – (video)
- Mixed reality system for supervising multi-robot SLAM – (video)
- Kilometer-Scale GNSS-Denied UAV Navigation
- mav_agent: Agentic control stack for UxVs
- superOdom: A highly robust and accurate LiDAR-only, LiDAR-inertial odometry
- Weekly Robotics #361
- Wireless Stepper Motor Driver with ESP32 and TMC2240
Got a Minute? 
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.