ROS News of the Week for August 31st, 2026
A big thank you to our colleagues at Bosch for hosting ROS By-The-Bay last night! Last night was our last local ROS event before ROSCon Global in Toronto.
If you are attending ROSCon Global in Toronto you should have received an email that details all of our amazing after hours events including a mixer on workshop day, a bus tour of the Waterloo robotics ecosystem, and our post-ROSCon hackathon.
Fares Espiro, a grad student in Sweden, just released the source code for his grad work on an indoor following robot with a full simulation stack based on Gazebo and ROS 2. It is definitely worth a look.
Another open source biped robot has entered the chat. This one is called Bimo and you can learn more here. We’re not quite at the pre-orders phase of the project, but this looks pretty cool.
Most of our summer Google Summer of Code students wrapped up this week. Two of the students posted final reports this week that are worth your attention:
- @mo_mo did a lot of work on quality assurance of Gazebo reset of core systems. RL training in Gazebo should run a whole lot smoother now.
- @ArizmendiWan has a suite of UI/UX improvements for the Open-RMF Crossflow diagram editor.
I want to extend a giant thank you to all of our wonderful students who spent their summer supporting our open source projects!
Events
- 2026-09-04 Open Ocean Software Community Day UK
- 2026-09-06 Roboracer VTC 2026
- 2026-09-08 ROS Meet Up Stockholm @ Nordic Tech Week
- 2026-09-10 Silly Robots Contest in SF
- 2026-09-15 ROS Meetup in Malmö Sweden @ Autonomy
- 2026-09-17 ROS Meetup Barcelona 8th Edition
- 2026-09-18 ROS Japan UG #64
- 2026-10-24 Weaponized Plastic Fighting League in Austin
- 2026-11-05 International Conference on Humanoid Robotics, Innovation & Leadership
- Bi-weekly ROS Asia Pacific Developer Meeting
ROSCons
- 2026-09-22 => 2026-09-24 Global ROSCon 2026 in Toronto - Three days remain for regular tickets.
- 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
- ROS PMC Minutes for September 1st, 2026
- ROS PMC Minutes for August 25th, 2026
- Gazebo PMC Meeting Minutes 2026-08-31
- Open Robotics Zulip Hits 1000 Actual Humans
- Robot Videos: Agility Robotics’ Digit Drags a Couch
- NVIDIA plans to acquire Hugging Face and keep AI development platform open
- ROS Meet Up Stockholm - Nordic Tech Week
- Reframe Systems raises $40M to scale its robotic microfactories for home building
- Deere faces headwinds in Q3 update and announces Reservoir R&D partnership
- Atlas: A World Model for Spatial Intelligence
- Reshaping the Physical World: Gravis Robotics Raises $200M for Construction Autonomy
- D-Robotics RDK S100P - A 128 TOPS alternative to NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX 16GB with Cortex-A78AE/R52+
- Arduino Core on Zephyr 1.0.0 is here!
- Weekly Robotics #374
ROS
Name the next Gazebo release! Gazebo M - SnakeROS — a pure-Python ROS 2 client for MicroPython
- Bimo, an open-source bipedal robotics kit with sim-to-real transfer
- Going through the AI for Industry Challenge
- Sim-first ROS 2 autonomy stack for an indoor person-following drone
- GSoC 2026: QA of Reset of Core Systems
- GSoC 2026: UI/UX Improvements to the Crossflow Diagram Editor
- Reinforcement Learning for Robotics Part 6: AI-Powered RC Balance Bot (Video)
- A standardized benchmark for robotics workloads on various compute platforms
- Draft REP 158: OpenUSD Conventions for Simulation Asset Interoperability in Open Source Robotics
- LIVESTREAM: Indy Autonomous Challenge at Laguna Seca 2026 (Video)
- Accurate Camera Calibration In The Wild - OpenCV Live! (Video)
- Why we did not extend /diagnostics?
- A one-command installer for the apt-based ROS 2 path
- Ament index ressources through unified cli interface
- GPS says ~5m accuracy but the fixes agree to 9 cm. Anyone else seen this?
- Embodied-sync: Synchronize, calibrate, align, and validate multimodal robot-learning data across sensors, clocks, live sessions, and recordings
- Upcoming webinar on using Ouster Colored Lidar
- Remote Teleop for arms
- Humanoid Robotics Use In Manufacturing?
- Homebrew dropping support for macOS intel / amd64
- Smart Pick-and-Place on OMY with GraspNet and Gemini
- Adaptive-clearance local controller for ROS 2 Nav2, balancing obstacle clearance with narrow-passage traversal
- Hybrid Event Frame Sensors: Modeling, Calibration, and Simulation – source
- How to Train a Cross-Embodiment Robot Navigation Policy with AI Agent
- Intelligent Robotics Labs Pixi workshop materials
- Low(er)-Cost Humanoid Robot Leverages DIY Actuators
- RoboticsAcademy: SKU-Based Palletizing with a UR10
- Visual & visual-inertial SLAM, SfM, and localization in pure Rust
- SKD-1, a skid-steer ground vehicle running ROS 2
- oriented_field_localization: 3-DoF pose from a single 2D LiDAR scan with no initial guess
- 3D IMU Visualization using ROS 2 Jazzy and ESP32S3 with MPU6050
Got a Minute?
I’m working on my slides for ROSCon. Here’s a shameless plug for my ROSCon talk and a reminder!
WE NEED YOU TO HELP REVIEW ROS PULL REQUESTS 
