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.

@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.

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!
Events
- 2026-09-14 ROS OE Community Meeting #63 - September 14th, 2026 @ 3pm UT
- 2026-09-15 ROS Meetup in Malmö Sweden @ Autonomy
- Due 2026-09-17: Name the next Gazebo release! Gazebo M
- 2026-09-17 ROS Meetup Barcelona 8th Edition
- 2026-09-18 ROS Japan UG #64
- 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
ROSCon Global 2026 Sponsors and Exhibitors
New ROS PMC Members
Open Source Safety Consortium: sharing safety evidence, not just code
Call for Open-Source Robotics Benchmarks (cash grant + test hardware)- NVIDIA at ROSCon 2026 in Toronto, Canada
- Comau automates picking, handling, and palletizing for Decathlon
- What bricklaying has taught Monumental about robots in construction
- Unitree shares down 53% from IPO debut
- Lyte raises $165M to help robots better sense their surroundings
- Agility Robotics reports $1.8M revenue ahead of humanoid SPAC
- RoboTok: An Internet-Scale Data Engine for Human Demonstration Video Retrieval and Dexterous Manipulation Learning
- Maven Robotics wants to steal your robot deployment deal
- Tactile Data Helps Robots Get Fast, Smart Hand Skills
- Are Self Driving Cars Safe as Early Data Suggests?
- Videos: Disaster Response Robots, Humanoid Robots, More
ROS
GSoC 2026: Physical AI Inference and Trajectory Upscaling for ros2_control
ROS 2 engineering skills for coding agents: v1.5.0
Gazebo Gymnasium : Bringing RL to Gazebo
ros2_shadow: running a candidate node next to production and diffing what they’d do
ros2_fault_injection: C++ fault injection framework for ROS 2 topics, services, and assertions – source
Magic Trick Performing Robot
Gazebo Event Camera Plugin for ROS 2 Jazzy + Gazebo Harmonic- New Packages for Jazzy Jalisco 2026-09-11
- rcl_logging_journal: an alternative logging backend implementation that can be used for ROS 2 applications via rcl_logging_interface
- Has anyone written a custom I²C transport for micro-ROS (or any MCU ROS stack)?
- Orion-Quadruped: ROS2-driven, 12-DOF quadruped robot dog that I designed, built, and programmed from scratch
- Ros2-project-gen — one command scaffolds a complete, ready-to-build ROS 2 project like create-react-app-style
- GPS says ~5m accuracy but the fixes agree to 9 cm. Anyone else seen this?
- Why we did not extend /diagnostics?
- New CLI tool: fastdds_transport_viz — predict & measure per-topic DDS transport in ROS 2
- Remote Teleop for arms
- Query and train directly from rosbags with a rosbag2 storage plugin for RRD
- 2nd ROS Meetup Malmö Sweden @ Autonomy
- Three bugs that changed how our sensor board talks to ROS 2
- Interop SIG, 03 September 2026: Discrete Event Simulation (DES) in Bevy (video)
- What is the hardest part of learning ROS 2 as a beginner
- The ros2_utils_tool finally hit version 1.0!
- Luxonis Solutions + Luxonis Agent Toolkit
- Autonomous Navigation and Interaction Bot “FINI”
- FMTX: Lazy Wavefront Search for Dynamic Replanning (C++/ROS 2 framework and benchmarks)
- SLAM benchmark on Livox Mid-360: public dataset + our own UAV flight data (KISS-ICP, DLIO, FAST-LIO2, GLIM)
- ROS 2 Windows CI on GitHub Actions: current options and a Pixi-based pattern
- VLM-Driven ROS 2 Navigation on Gazebo via Dragonwing IQ-9075
- Rolling-Bonxai: A rolling voxel grid implementation of Bonxai to handle large maps in ROS 2 · GitHub
- What we learned when our robot learned to drive
- Introducing CUDA Rust: Two Tracks for Writing GPU Kernels
- DreamWaQ++ – Obstacle-Aware Quadrupedal Locomotion
- erdi-lrf-drivers: Open-source Python, Arduino and ROS 2 drivers for ERDI 905 nm laser rangefinder modules
- bcr_bot for ROS 2 Jazzy
- HM-LD1 ROS driver: HM-LD1 dToF Lidar depth sensor module
- Arduino Core on Zephyr 1.0.0 is here!
- Accurate Camera Calibration In The Wild (Video)
- Weekly Robotics #375
Got a Minute? 
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!




