ROS News for the Week of April 14th, 2025

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ROS News for the Week of April 14th, 2025

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The ROS 2 Kilted Kaiju feature freeze was Monday! We should have information about the release process early next week!


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I’ve scheduled a ROS By-The-Bay meetup for 2025-05-01T01:00:00Z coincide with the Kilted Kaiju Test and Tutorial Party.


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Check out this teaser for, “Any6D: Model-free 6D Pose Estimation of Novel Objects” by KAIST and NVIDIA that will be presented at CVPR 2025! The demo seems to show ROS integration. Source code isn’t out yet but you can read the paper here. Heads up, we’re planning a ROS meetup at CVPR this year, more details will be out in a couple of weeks.


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The fine folks at ETH Zurich have released ORCA Hand, an open source software and hardware hand you can build at home for under $2000.


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The fine folks at HuggingFace :hugs:, the maintainers of LeRobot, have acquired
the equally awesome folks at Pollen Robotics. No word yet on what the merger means for the team, but we expect it to be awesome!


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I came across a wonderful gif this week about the upcoming ROS 1 end-of-life on May 31st.

Events

News

ROS

Got a Minute? :alarm_clock:

We’re looking for three new contributors to help us with two new features and one issue with the Open-RMF Site Editor. Open-RMF is our brand new open source multi-robot fleet manager written in :crab:Rust​:crab: and is the bleeding edge of what we are working on!

:crab: Open-RMF Site Editor #217: We’re need someone to create a way to save the user’s view point in the Open-RMF Site Editor that can we loaded when the user starts the application.

:crab: Open-RMF Site Editor #216: There is a bug such that deleting a fiducial that belongs to a group will permanently block any other fiducial in its drawing from being able to join that group.

:crab: Open-RMF Site Editor #225: We need a simple dialog that warns users before discarding unsaved changes. This is a great first issue for those just getting started with Rust.

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I believe it is very important for the branding of the ros project that this picture is used as the release image

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I’ve seen the actual release image and it is just as good if not better. Def my favorite so far.

It might even be better than Iron, which is saying a lot!

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Nothing can beat my favourite distro image (for clarity, Iron), but it’s definitely a close second!

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What’s so offensive about David’s post it has to be flagged?

While Noetic is going to EOL in about a month, I also don’t get the ROS-1-shaming that some seem to be engaging in. It’s almost as-if there isn’t almost 15 years of robotics applications & projects that successfully made use of it.

Quite a few products still depend on ROS 1 – looking at you Clearpath fi – and that’s just a fact of live.

For numerous applications, ROS 1 is still plenty capable. For plenty applications, ROS 2 is still not usable.

All of that is OK. ROS 2 is not >= ROS 1 – even though the bump to the major version nr seems to suggest it and has people confused about that.

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Attacking individuals over what they choose to work on is not appropriate for this forum. The original (before the author edited it) was very explicit about who it was directed at, and the edited one was unfortunately not much better.

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Perhaps I only saw the edited version (with the meme with ROS 1 skeleton at the bottom of the ocean) - not sure how that’s offensive.

I get the feeling that OSRF/C doesn’t like that people are pushing back against the very tiring ‘have you still not moved on to the oh so much better ROS 2?’. Perhaps they should listen to those who haven’t migrated yet - and to those who have but aren’t all that elated about how much better it is.

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the previous version was indeed ‘targeted’ at a specific organisation, not no one in particular.

That was indeed not necessarily very classy.

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I am here to defend David’s right of speech.

I thank David to truly care about open source robotics.

Many in the community are afraid to speak up, fearing retaliation from the Foundation. Yet, if the community keeps its silence, they gonna be targeted in any critical comment. Now it is David, the next one could be gaverderhoorn. But this is not the first incident either…

Indeed David made a critical post depicting ROS2 & OpenSource is drowning, which many people here probably agree including gaverderhoorn. The real concern is not that people who worked at OSRF are now focused on the closed-source Flowstate project (that’s a fact btw). The problem here, it is the OSRF who should rescue the drowning baby (ROS2 and OpenSource); and the OSRF administration didn’t like this implication.

We know the OSRF has failed to become an independent foundation and still heavily needs these people who worked at OSRF after two long years. There are still questions the Foundation never answered:

@Vanessa_Yamzon_Orsi
What is the financial situation of OSRF? As a public non-profit organization, you owe the community transparency. Is it true that the Foundation currently sits on $4 million in the bank? And how much money do you collect from the OSRA members? What areas do you spend them?

@gbiggs
What gonna you do with that money? Do you have any project in the pipeline? Where are the solutions? How many committee would you need to set up before that? Hey, the kid is drowning… but yeah you keep silencing people instead.

If you truly support freedom of speech, then create an open forum right here.

Of course, it won’t always be comfortable for the leadership, but that’s what real discourse looks like. Anyone is free to step away if this is not for them. Especially someone who has thicker skin would be much better.

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$4,370,521 according to causeqi

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Adding my unsolicited 2 cents.

I haven’t seen the original post of @DLu , so I can’t know if I agree/disagree with the tone/message of is meme. But I trust that he did not mean to offend anyone.

I think that there is a thin line between censorship and moderation.

I support ROS, Open Source Software (and closed source too) and I can only be grateful for people that keep maintaining ROS.

But I want people to feel free to express, politely and respectfully, their concerns about the current state of ROS2, its future and the way in which the money contributed by sponsors is spent.

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@doganulus are you back? :slight_smile:

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this is truly the most entertaining forum

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I’d like to remind folks in this thread that folks at Intrinsic still contribute heavily to this community, as PMC leads, major contributors, PR reviewers, and more. I would ask as someone completely external from that group to stop attacking them like they’re doing something wrong. They’re people doing their best - just like you - to make the community better - just like you. If you want to push out the people with the tribal knowledge and long-term context about ‘why things are the way they are’, the direction these threads have taken are doing a fantastic job at disincentivizing their current and future involvement. If this kind of negativity was directed towards me on a regular basis, I’d be closing up shop on Nav2 and finding something else to do with my time.

I don’t disagree things could be improved, there are a few things I’m concerned by, and there’s some pretty good faith questions to be asked, but that’s not an excuse to get nasty (and I know I’m not the perfect messenger myself at times). No one at the foundation is going to meaningfully respond to questions that aren’t really about the questions, but rather venting. If your organization is a member of the OSRA, ask you Representative to bring up some of these important topics in the next TGC meeting. In fact, David himself might be a good champion for that as he sits on that committee currently.

Maybe having something like a Quarterly Foundation Townhall might be nice - with one of the sessions being in-person at ROSCon. I did a quick search and it looks like that’s not so uncommon with open-source foundations / organizations and might be a time to more productively discuss these topics and have follow up to start addressing the addressable concerns.

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Yawn. Boring. Actually, I am waiting for the Governor General of Canada.

Yes, he turned Foundation into a Central Asian autocracy (without kumis, though), but it is easier to make deals with dictators, especially if they are willing to be benevolent.

Until the drowning kid is saved.

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@david_is_damn_right – a newly create account just for this thread, itself anonymous but attacking other people by name? Classy! Great role model. So brave. Thanks for making it absolutely obvious why we need the flagging feature in Discourse.

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I am not interested in how OSRF utilizes its funds.

As an individual, I believe it is one’s freedom to engage in behavior that shames ROS 1 users. However, if a public relations officer engages in such behavior, it could be seen as a problem with the organization’s overall ethics.

I understand that the division of developers between ROS 1 and ROS 2 is an issue. However, would ROS 1 developers who have been treated in such a manner voluntarily transition to ROS 2 development?

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I’m flagging your post as inappropriate for violating the community guidelines. Just so you know that it is not (only) osrf censorship, but also independent users wanting a healthy climate here.

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I feel the need to point out that ros/ros2 are free software, and do not tax you nor require you use them. Therefore, there is no obligation for the project governance to abide by a social contract, or moral imperative to force them to.

As much as I sympathize with your frustrations that arise from using ros due to network effects, it’s silly to attack project governance for being incompetent and then getting mad when they mute you

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People love the original ROS spirit and open-source. They don’t want it to die like depicted in David’s post. I think it is the main message there.

I got several private messages from the community members thanking me for bringing these issues. They cannot say it publicly for obvious reasons. I say it because I don’t use ROS at all.

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