ROS News for the week of September 14th, 2026
ROSCon Global 2026 is next week in Toronto! If you can’t make it, our free live streams of the event will go up 2026-09-23T13:00:00Z and continue the following day. We’ll make an announcement when the stream goes live and pin the post on Discourse.
There are ton of official and unofficial events happening around ROSCon Global. If you are attending the event, we have a Rootly Mixer scheduled for Tuesday night, and a hackathon and bus tour planned for Friday (you should have an invite in your e-mail). I believe NVIDIA has a number of informal meetups planned for the ROSCon hotel coffee shop, and there’s an Aerial Robotics Meetup and Intel / Trossen Robotics mixer on Tuesday night
@formiat just released a really well constructed drone navigation simulation built on top of Gazebo, ROS 2, and PX4 and has fairly extensive documentation. If you are looking to get into autonomous drone navigation this is a great starting point.
Ahead of ROSCon our colleagues at InOrbit have released Open Robot Ops (ORO
) an open source robot operations platform. ORO is an open source reference platform for the new ISO 21423 standard for how autonomous mobile robots (AMRs, called IMRs) and fleet managers (IMRFMs) talk to each other. They gave a teaser of it at ROS By-The-Bay about a month back. ORO supports both ROS 2 and Open-RMF out of the box, so if you are looking to automate a robot fleet it is worth checking out. More coverage on the Robot Report.
Events
- 2026-09-20 Bring What You Built — Hyderabad robotics demo day + paid internships
- 2026-09-22 Aerial Robotics Meetup @ ROSCon Global 2026
- 2026-09-22 Bots & Bevs: An Intel Robotics Experience
- 2026-10-05 => 2026-10-09 Tech Week 2026 - Deep Tech Events
- 2026-10-05 Cloud Robotics WG - Logging and Observability Guide Review Part 3
- 2026-10-05 SF Tech Week Robot Show-n-Tell
- 2026-10-06 SF Tech Week Smart Fleet Meet & Greet
- 2026-10-06 SF Tech Week Robotics Happy Hour with LiveKit & Dimensional
- 2026-10-06 SF Tech Week Designing for Physical AI: From Innovation Lab to Factory Floor
- 2026-10-06 SF Tech Week Physical AI Happy Hour Hosted by Coreweave
- 2026-10-07 SF Tech Week Industrial Tech After Dark
- 2026-10-08 SF Tech Week Physical AI Playbook: From Prototype to Scale
- 2026-10-08 SF Tech Week Physical AI for the Built Environment
- 2026-10-08 SF Tech Week Building the Physical AI World
- 2026-10-09 SF Tech Week AI Frontier Summit - Intelligence at Scale: Agents, Physical AI & Chips
- 2026-10-09 SF Tech Week Bots & Bevs
- 2026-10-09 SF Tech Week Stanford AI Lab
- 2026-10-24 Weaponized Plastic Fighting League in Austin
- 2026-11-05 International Conference on Humanoid Robotics, Innovation & Leadership
- 2026-11-07 ROS Meetup Cartagena Colombia
- Bi-weekly ROS Asia Pacific Developer Meeting
ROSCons
- 2026-09-22 => 2026-09-24 Global ROSCon 2026 in Toronto
- 2026-10-21 => 2026-10-23 ROSCon UK in Edinburg - registration now open
- 2026-10-23 => 2026-10-26 ROScon Singapore - applications open
- 2026-10-27 => 2026-10-28 ROSCon Spain in Valencia - reg open!
- 2026-11-03 ROSCon Italy in Bologna
- 2026-11-25 => 2026-11-26 ROSCon Belgium in Nivelles - reg is open!
- 2026-12-03 => 2026-12-04 ROScon Turkey in Istanbul - CFP opens soon
- 2026-12-03 => 2026-12-04 ROS-Industrial Conference Europe 2026
News
InOrbit.AI releases OpenRobOps ISO 21423 reference implementation- Gazebo PMC Meeting Minutes 2026-09-14
- ROS PMC Minutes for September 15, 2026
- Intrinsic at ROSCon 2026
- Dimensional Grant Program – free robot hardware
- Indy Autonomous Challenge Makes Self-Driving Racing History at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca
- ROBORACER @ IROS 2026m
- OLogic: Engineering Smarter Robots and Edge AI Devices with Cadence
- NSF announces Physical AI Funding
- Robot Videos: Quadrotor From Birotors, Lunabotics, More
- Digit 5 Sets a New Bar for Humanoid Robot Safety
- SoftBank agrees to acquire Robotics and AI Institute
- Icarus Robotics flies ISS-bound robot in microgravity for the first time
- The evolution of Digit: Agility Robotics’ journey from Cassie to Digit 5
- Agility’s Digit 5 humanoid has new legs, batteries, safety upgrades
- ROS medical community updates
- NEW! Physical AI Robotics Masterclass — 2026 Cohort
ROS
- GSoC 2026: Physical AI Inference and Trajectory Upscaling for ros2_control
- Gazebo Event Camera Plugin for ROS 2 Jazzy + Gazebo Harmonic
- Rosbag2 dynamic recorder (dynrec)
- px4-ros2-drone-nav: map-free 3D navigation with a persistent D* Lite planner and CUDA MPPI
- ros2_fault_injection: C++ fault injection framework for ROS 2 topics, services, and assertions
- Fingers as Legs — A hand with places to be
- AgentSTAR: Agentic Shape Tracking and Reconstruction from Monocular Videos
- New packages for Kilted Kaiju 2026-09-17
- New packages and patch release for Humble Hawksbill 2026-09-14
- New Packages for Jazzy Jalisco 2026-09-11
- A one-command installer for the apt-based ROS 2 path
- How should place-originated spatial constraints participate in task planning and assignment in next-generation Open-RMF?
- New SMACC demo in Gazebo using the PX4 flight stack
- AssemblyGrid v1: benchmarking multi-robot production, handoffs, coalitions, and concurrency
- Native ROS 2 on Zephyr with Cyclone DDS
- Colcon-buildx: cross-compiling ROS 2 workspaces for arm64 and armhf boards, with prebuilt images for Kria, Pynq and Raspberry Pi
- Dropping armhf (32-bit ARM) binary packages for Gazebo
- Lyrical tutorial docker container
- New CLI tool: fastdds_transport_viz — predict & measure per-topic DDS transport in ROS 2
- Nav2 Ready v0.1.0 — A CLI readiness checker for custom Nav2 robots
- Debug, Visualize and Teleoperate anything ROS2 with Phantom Bridge
- Has anyone written a custom I²C transport for micro-ROS (or any MCU ROS stack)?
- An async first Rust client for ROS supporting multiple backends: ROS1, ROS2, rosbridge, and Zenoh
- Model Predictive Control in JAX
- Escaping the Robotics Build Trap with OpenRobOps
- VLM-Driven ROS 2 Navigation on Gazebo via Dragonwing IQ-9075
- Building smarter AMRs with the Arduino VENTUNO Q board
- ROS Japan UG #64 3D GS特集！ - connpass
- rqt_lifecycle_manager: RQT plugin to inspect and control ROS 2 lifecycle
- Egocentric 4D Demonstrations of Human Terrain Traversal
- Making an ESP32-based quadcopter from scratch
- Turbo Boosts CircuitPython Performance Up to 20x
- Isaac ROS 4.5 packaged for conda on top of RoboStack (ROS 2 Jazzy, CUDA 13)
- Joint Multi-Person Body Detection and Orientation Estimation via One Unified Embedding
- Inverse Kinematics for a Tentacle Robot
- ROS1 Noetic & ROS2 Humble/Lyrical driver for HM-LD1 dToF Lidar depth sensor module
- rosbag2_storage_rrd: An experimental rosbag2 storage plugin that records ROS 2 bags as Rerun .rrd files.
No ROS news next week as I’ll be busy running our post-ROSCon hackathon.
