OSRF Google Summer of Code 2025 
Hi Everyone,
I am excited to announce that all of our Google Summer of Code (GSoC) projects for 2025 are now available online in our GSoC Wiki. If you are unfamiliar with GSoC, it is a summer internship program sponsored by Google that is open to undergraduate and graduate students in most countries (see video below). The GSoC program allows students to work with veteran open source developers over the summer to contribute to open source projects.
This year, all five Open Robotics projects (ROS, Gazebo, Open-RMF, ROS Infrastructure, and ROS Control) will participate in GSoC. This will be our only internship opportunity this year, so we made sure to recruit as many mentors as possible. We will also be posting an open internship thread on ROS Discourse in the next couple days.
2025 Open Robotics Projects
This year we will offer sixteen GSoC projects across our five open source projects. These projects will be mentored or co-mentored by sixteen seasoned contributors from the Open Robotics community. I’ve summarized the projects below, but you can read all about them on our project wiki page.
- Gazebo:
- Open-RMF:
- Improving UI / UX of Site Editor with @grey and Xiyu Oh
- Workflow Diagram Editor with @grey and @Luca
- Multi-Agent Traffic Optimization with @grey and @Luca
- New Open-RMF Demo Demo with @Aaron_Chong
- ROS:
- ROS Infrastructure:
- VCSTool Improvements with @claraberendsen and @jrivero
- Mixin composition in colcon-mixin with @cottsay and Sean McGrath
- SDFormat on PyPi with @jrivero
- ROS Control:
Project Proposals
Student applications for GSoC will be open from 2025-03-24T07:00:00Z→2025-04-08T07:00:00Z. Students must apply using the application form on the official GSoC website.
After speaking with our mentors I want to call out a few things that we’re looking for in student applications. Students applying to our GSoC projects should make sure to highlight the following things in their application:
- We want to see your work, even if it’s not perfect! Please include projects from school, work, or personal initiatives. Include links to your GitHub/GitLab profile and/or a personal project page. We’re looking for students who actively code and improve their skills.
- We prefer students with some open source experience. If you’ve contributed to a FOSS project, or an Open Robotics project, please call that out. We want to see that you are familiar with the process of submitting a pull request to an open source project and working with the maintainer to get that pull request merged. These don’t have to be big pull requests, a single line or character change is fine!
- If you have experience with one of our projects, like ROS or Gazebo, please mention that! Classroom experience is more than sufficient. If you have been to a ROS event (either in person, or virtual) call that out! We’re looking for students who are active ROS users and part of the broader ROS community.
- Our mentors are looking for students with strong written communication skills. Our GSoC students will spend the summer mostly communicating with their mentors via written communications. It is important that students are able to express themselves clearly and succinctly. We ask that students not use large language models to write their project proposals, however using an LLM to check grammar and spelling is acceptable. Our mentors may choose to reject students they suspect used LLMs to write their applications.
Finally, the best way to enhance your GSoC proposal is to connect with our mentors and the ROS community. Consider submitting a pull request to one of our projects. Most Open Robotics project repositories have “Good First Issue” and “Help Wanted” tags in their issue trackers. If you have time, please consider making a small project contribution. For guidance, feel free to join our Discord server.