ROS Community Highlights Multi-Robot Simulation and New Tools

ROS News for the Week of October 12th, 2026

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We have a ton of great events lined up for this weekend and next week including:
ROSCon China in Shanghai, RoboBusiness in Santa Clara, our monthly Gazebo Community Meeting on scalable multi-robot simulation in ROS 2 and Gazebo, RobOpsCon 26 in Mountain View, our October ROS By-The-Bay Meetup at Intrinsic, and our bi-weekly ROS-ffice Hours.

Have you ever wanted to run RViz during an SSH session but you forgot to enable X11 forwarding? Now you can run a stripped down version of RViz in your terminal!

Speaking of colored terminals, DendROS is a new tool that colors your ROS 2 terminal output with a bunch of additional features.

I missed this at ICRA 2027, but the best multi-robot paper this year was multi_drone_slung_load_master: a package that enables slung load carrying with a multi-drone system using ROS 2.

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We’re getting a lot of vibe coded tools for ROS right now, which is great, but a lot of them seem to be re-inventing the wheel. robodev.tools is a new website that let’s you search a few thousand ROS tools available on Github. Consider taking a look if you need a specific tool, and before you decide to burn some tokens on yet another vibe coded tool.

Events

• 2026-10-16 => 2026-10-18 Maritime Robotics hackathon in San Francisco
• 2026-10-19 => 2026-10-21 FIRA USA in Yakima
• 2026-10-20 => 2026-10-21 RoboBusiness in Santa Clara
• 2026-10-21 (7pm PT, new time) Gazebo Community Meeting Scalable Multi-Robot Simulation in ROS 2 and Gazebo
• 2026-10-22 RobOpsCon 26
• 2026-10-22 ROS By-The-Bay October Meetup at Intrinsic: Swift for ROS
• 2026-10-23 ROS-ffice Hours
• 2026-10-24 Weaponized Plastic Fighting League in Austin
• 2026-10-26 Community Meeting #65
• 2026-11-03 Physical AI & Robotics Developer Workshop with Intel
• 2026-11-05 International Conference on Humanoid Robotics, Innovation & Leadership
• 2026-11-07 ROS Meetup Cartagena Colombia
• 2026-12-07 Humanoid Robots for Space Exploration @ Humanoids 2026
• 2026-12-07 => 2026-12-09 2026 IEEE-RAS 25th International Conference on Humanoid Robots
• 2026-12-12 => 2026-12-13 Maker Faire Shenzhen
• Bi-weekly ROS Asia Pacific Developer Meeting

ROSCons

• 2026-09-16 => 2026-09-18 ROSCon China in Shanghai
• 2026-10-21 => 2026-10-23 ROSCon UK in Edinburg - registration open
• 2026-10-23 => 2026-10-26 ROScon Singapore - registration open
  • Pre-ROSConSG Hackathon I
  • Pre-ROSConSG Hackathon II
• 2026-10-27 => 2026-10-28 ROSCon Spain in Valencia - registration open
• 2026-11-03 ROSCon Italy in Bologna - registration open
• 2026-11-25 => 2026-11-26 ROSCon Belgium in Nivelles - registration 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
• 2027-01-26 => 2027-01-28 ROSCon DE in Ulm
• 2027-05-20 => 2027-05-21 ROSConJP in Osaka

News

• These weeks at Open Robotics HQ (since pre-ROSCon Global)
• Gazebo PMC Meeting Minutes 2026-10-12
• ROSCon Global 2026: A record-breaking events
• Please take the Open Robotics Annual Survey
• Adding a new recurring Open-RMF Project meeting: Office Hours (literally)!
• New Chapter: Symbotic acquires cellumation
• Gemini 4 Argon for Robotics
• TIER IV and Technical University of Munich establish Autoware research center
• Videos: Reconfigurable Robots, Microducks Sing, More
• Promise Robotics partners with D.R. Horton on physical AI for homebuilding
• Jabil discusses the pace of humanoid robot development and production
• SafeWorld emerges from stealth to build, deploy robot safety simulation technologies
• Robotics Connected: robotics jobs, events, companies and news
• takto-one: Open-source hand exoskeleton
• Women in Robotics You Need to Know About 2026
• Chicago Area Robotics Group
• ROSCon 2026: Turtles in Toronto on Hackster.io

ROS

• RViz, but in your terminal!
• Find a ROS tool with robodev.tools
• DendROS - colored ROS 2 terminal output with utils
• ICRA Best paper: multi_drone_slung_load_master: Code to enable slung load carrying with a multi-drone system
• Isaac ROS 5.0 with Pixi
• get-ros2: Unofficial scripts to install ROS 2
• genz-lio: GenZ-LIO: SOTA robust LiDAR-inertial odometry
• zenoh-explorer: A GUI application for exploring, debugging, and monitoring Zenoh networks
• nanoflann 2.0 : a C++11 header-only library for Nearest Neighbor (NN) search with KD-trees
• PlanSys2 moves to Kairos and STN
• RFC Consolidating and Modernizing Integration Test Architecture for gz_ros2_control
• AI-assisted inspection of ROS 2 systems: a preview of DDS Monitor Pro’s MCP integration
• VizMini2: RViz, teleop and ROS 2 tools on your Android phone or tablet
• Advice on ROS 2, GLIM and nvblox for Autonomous Drones
• yeah-hand: Open Source Robotic Hand for Robots and Humans
• DC 0.2: Data Collection for ROS 2 on Jazzy, Lyrical and Rolling
• DialoStack: task-oriented spoken dialogue for ROS 2, with the LLM kept out of the control flow
• Logging and Observability Guide Review Part 4
• RoboShield v2: an inline command firewall gateway for ROS 2
• RobotLens: connected engineering workspace for ROS 2
• Rclnodejs 2.3.0: ROS 2 Actions over WebSocket and HTTP/SSE
• New packages for Humble Hawksbill 2026-10-12
• Rokoko Device SDK update: more robust USB stream, OTA-ready Smartgloves II and a pinch detector example
• SpaceMouse teleop + MuJoCo visual twin & data collection for AgileX PiPER
• knoblog: a changelog of default-parameter changes from git history
• Nav2 zigzag navigation in a large road environment with Isaac Sim.
• EasyNav 0.5.0 released for Humble, Jazzy, Kilted and Lyrical
• SiGNgapore - An Interactive Dataset for Sign-based Visual Navigation
• charqui: Modern jerk-limited trajectory generation
• Going to Great Depths to Map Lakebeds
• RTNav: Towards Real-Time Zero-Shot Object Navigation
• Interbody Wire for Reconfigurable Robots
• OpenCV to NVIDIA Isaac Sim: Building the Physical AI Pipeline
• SuperNav: An Agentic Navigation System for Any Task in Any Scene
• TEMPO: Learning Temporal Context for Dynamic Robot Manipulation
• Q8botOne - A palm-sized open-source quadruped robot
• kornia-slam: visual-inertial SLAM and VIO in Rust
• TerraSeg: Self-Supervised Ground Segmentation for Any LiDAR

Got a minute?

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Please take a moment to complte the Open Robotics Annual Survey