ROS News for the Week of November 2nd, 2026

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Our first ever ROSCon in Italy was a smashing success this week as they way overshot their attendance goals for their first event! I just had a call with @rbonghi and he was brimming with pride and excitement after the event. Congratulations to the whole team and I look forward to hopefully joining you next year.

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Coming up tomorrow is our second annual ROS Meetup in Colombia. The team behind the event has put in a ton of work, and “meetup” might be under selling it, as it is a full day event for ROS developers in South America.

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ManyForge is an open-source, robot-brand-agnostic manipulation framework designed as a ROS-free C++ and Python core, using ROS exclusively as an integration layer for hardware drivers and controllers. The framework features a drag-and-drop graphical editor called the Composer, allowing users to build robot programs as behavior trees within a unified 3D environment that supports real-time collision checking, simulated previews, and live state monitoring

lopsy_demo
Cable-driven tentacle robots are really hot right now, but they do have actual uses out in the real world! I was really excited to see this ROS 2-based workspace for a rod-driven, superelastic NiTi continuum robot featuring asymmetric rolling joints designed to steer chest catheters. The repository provides a highly efficient C++ static solver that maps rod tensions to joint angles, taking into account friction and bending stiffness to predict the robot’s shape in real time. Really cool stuff.

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A couple of weeks ago during ROSCon, Intrinsic open sourced Intrinsic Core which includes their foundational capabilities and services from that have been used for real-world manufacturing deployments. There’s some really cool stuff in there like a reference solution for CNC machine tending, and a fairly performant kinematic solver that’s worth checking out. Intrinsic Core is interoperable with ROS via standard workspaces, message definitions, and tools, allowing developers to combine their existing ROS packages with Intrinsic capabilities.

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Need a quick and easy way to visually edit a behavior tree? Check out behaviortrees.com! It is a online graphical behavior tree editor that supports a variety of different formats.

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The microduck_ros2 project is a ros2 bridge to Pollen Robotics’ miniature “Microduck” biped. By wrapping the robot’s existing neural locomotion policies and physical actuator models, the package exposes standard ROS 2 interface like velocity commands, IMU data, and a head camera feed that enables developers to integrate ROS packages like Nav2.

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Got a Minute?

The ROS 2 image processing pipeline has not had a dedicated maintainer for as long as I’ve worked with the project. We desperately need someone from the community to step up and become a maintainer for the package. If you work heavily with computer vision and ROS this is a unique opportunity to become the go-to person for all things ROS and computer vision related.

Long term contributor, and all around excellent human being, @peci1 is trying to resolve some outstanding issues in the package. This is a unique opportunity to get mentored by one of our long term ROS contributors and make a major contribution to the project. If I wasn’t already buried under an overwhelming amount of work I certainly would be volunteering for the job! If you are an early career engineer who would like to make an impact on the project this is a unique opportunity to contribute as your efforts will make a positive impact on almost every robot that uses ROS 2.

ROS News for the Week of November 2nd, 2026