ROS News for the Week of March 10th, 2025
NVIDIA GTC is next week. We’ve got a big after party planned that we’ve co-organized with our friends at Silicon Valley Robotics. Everyone is welcome to attend, even if you are not going to GTC!
If you are going to GTC, there is a robotics meetup that they’ve planned for Wednesday along with a handy list of robotics sessions at the event. (Note that you have to be a registered GTC attendee for both the meetup and the event list).
Our colleague @Pyo over at Robotis has put together a prototype that integrates Hugging Face’s LeRobot arm with the TurtleBot3 Burger. The combination is an affordable option for those looking for a mobile manipulator that supports teleop and RL training. Somewhat related, our friends at Seeed Studios have organized a LeRobot Hackathon for the weekend after GTC.
Check out the PincOpen, a low cost and open source parallel-finger gripper. The design is based on the gripper used in Pollen Robotic’s Reachy robot
This week @iliao announced that they have just releases an US$89 robot kit that runs ROS 2 / microROS on an ESP32 and features an actual LIDAR.
Events
- 2025-03-18 ROS By-The-Bay X Silicon Valley Robotics GTC After Party
- 2025-03-19 NVIDIA GTC Physical AI Developer Meetup (must have a GTC ticket to register).
- 2025-03-17 ==> 2025-03-21 ROS / Robotics Sessions at GTC
- 2025-03-22 Seeed Embodied AI Hackathon with LeRobot
- 2025-03-26 Dronecode Philly Meetup
- 2025-04-24 ROS Meetup at European Robotics Forum
- 2025-04-24 Intrinsic / Automatica Sponsored Fun Run at European Robotics Forum
- 2025-04-20 Aerial Robotics Meeting
- 2025-04-28 International Workshop on Robotics Software Engineering
- 2025-04-30 Robotics Summit & Expo wsg @gbiggs.
- 2025-05-15 ROS-Industrial Consortium Americas 2025 Annual Meeting Detroit
- 2025-05-23 ICRA 2025 Advancing Quantitative and QUAlitative SIMulators for marine applications
- 2025-05-30 => 2025-05-31 2025 Open Hardware Summit in Edinburgh
News
Here’s some good news: this week over 90 people joined the OSRA along with Heex.io. For new individual members we’ll be getting back to you shortly. Membership info is on our website.
- ROS PMC Minutes for 2025-03-12
- ROS users meet up at NVIDIA GTC 2025?
- Ros-controls PMC meeting 12th March 2025
- Why Vision Processing is Shifting Closer to the Sensor - Audrow Nash Podcast
- America Wastes $6+ Billion Worth Of Recyclables A Year. Can Robots and AI Help?
Gemini Robotics brings AI into the physical world
- Video Friday
- Singapore’s National Robotics Programme launches RoboNexus
- Dexterity picks up $95M in funding for container unloading robots
- Waymo was slapped with nearly 600 parking tickets last year in SF alone
- Yet another AI robotics firm lands major funding, as Dexterity closes latest round
- Video: Ridgeback with Two UR5e Arms on an Elevated Top Plate
- Video: Omnidirectional Mobile Manipulator with WheelBot in Isaac Sim, managed by Open-RMF via Zenoh
- Why is Gazebo very famous in the ROS community? what about Webots?
- FOSSASIA 2025 Live Stream
- Humanoid Robotics Masterclass The Construct (Paid)
ROS
- Low-cost LiDAR robot kit for beginners
- Hugging Face LeRobot with TurtleBot3
- Articulated Robotics: GPUs & Robots - The Easy Way
- Weekly Robotics is so back!
- Deep Reinforcement Learning for mobile robot navigation in ROS Gazebo simulator.
- The ROS Buildfarm Now Runs on 24.04
- Reusable Components in URDF
- Mobile Robot URDF Maker
- ROS 2 Jazzy Packages for Ubuntu 22.04
- GPS RTK Support for ROS 2 Jazzy – Any Recommended Wrappers or Drivers?
- Introducing obstacle avoidance function in Autoware
- LiDAR-RT: Gaussian-based Ray Tracing for Dynamic LiDAR Re-simulation CVPR 2025
- ROS 2 package for fusing 360° equirectangular images with 3D LiDAR data.
- PincOpen – A low cost and open source parallel-finger gripper, derived from Reachy 2’s gripper
- LIR-LIVO: A Lightweight,Robust Lidar/Vision/Inertial Odometry with Illumination-Resilient Deep Features
- ICRA2025: OpenGS-SLAM: Open-Set Dense Semantic SLAM with 3D Gaussian Splatting for Object-Level Scene Understanding
- ROS×Python Let’s implement parallel processing (Japanese)
- TRG-planner: Traversal Risk Graph-Based Path Planning in Unstructured Environments
- Open Source Mechatronics Course
- micro-ROS library for Platform.IO
- Livox MID-360 ROS 2 Driver for RoboRacer/ F1Tenth
- Simple, Cute, Open Hardware Robot Arm
- Self Docking Using April Tags in ROS 2
- Formula to optimize DDS communication performance in multi-robot systems.
- ROS Jazzy Crash Course at the Construct
- ROS package for LIDAR odometry with rotation optimization
- ROS 2 Dev Container
Got a Minute? / Appreciation 
This is normally where I post a few issues that could use some community support.
Good news, all of my issues for this week have a new contributor working on them!
Here are a few things that have happened this week:
- Ever want to automagically set an environment variable in your ROS workspace? Github user @SuperGops7 just merged a pull request into docs.ros.org that shows you how to use Ament to set environment variables.
- Python type hinting in RCLPy is coming to a dev environment near you. @InvincibleRMC has a couple of PRs in flight.
- We could really use some help reviewing these PRs to get them over the line.