ROS News for the Week of September 7th, 2026

ROS News for the Week of September 7th, 2026


ROSCon Global 2026 is a little over a week away! We just published our full list of sponsors, exhibitors, demos, and drop-in sessions to the ROSCon Global website. If you are joining us in Toronto it is time to start planning your schedule!



Proving the safety and reliability of your robot is incredibly important; it is also an incredibly complex, expensive, time consuming, and boring task. @Iliabara, CTO of OSRA member company Polymath Robotics, is looking to change that. He just announced a new Open Source Safety Consortium that aims to bring shared safety certified tools to the open source community. They just published their first worked example, a protective-stop prototype, with firmware, hardware designs, and a draft safety case all published together as an open source software and hardware project.

This is a community effort, and Ilia is looking for members of the Open Robotics community to help push this work forward!



My apologies for the slop, but this is an amazing project that doesn’t exactly produce eye-catching imagery. @reece-the-robot just announced a fantastic fault injection framework for ROS 2 that allows users to simulate a variety of degraded operating conditions programatically. For a long time distributed systems engineers have talked about “chaos monkeys,” or testing complex systems by randomly removing or degrading components to evaluate how the system responds, as a means to improve reliability. This new framework brings that capability to ROS by degrading or removing particular ROS topics. If you’re looking to send a robot out into the real world you definitely need this tool in your toolbox.


writing_ros2

@vedh1234, a summer Google of Code student for the ROS Control project, just posted his final report on physical AI inference and trajectory upscaling for ros2_control.

The problem with Physical AI models is that often produce joint targets at a frequency significantly lower than underlying hardware they are trying to control (e.g. a 20-50hz planning loop versus 500Hz to 1KHz control loop). To fix this problem Vedhas built a series of three open source tools for ROS Control that help address the discrepancies between high level Physical AI models and a robot’s low-level control loop. For example, the tool pictured above takes a series of 49 points generated by a PAI model and smooths them into a continuous 200Hz trajectory.


magic
:magic_wand: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

For example, Sean Tsai used a custom toy robot, computer vision, and ROS 2 to build a robot that performs magic tricks for an audience. Absolutely amazing work!

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Take a moment to look at the Open Source Safey website. If you are working on safety certification for your robot we would love for you to get involved!