Fleet APIs, in-orbit assembly and zero-copy rosidl
Serve opens its delivery fleet to any developer, Caltech assembles a truss in orbit, and ROS 2 debates moving zero-copy into rosidl itself.
#ros2
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Robot ID codes and patrol robots
China drafts a lifetime ID code for every robot it makes, Ring launches a patrol drone and security rover, and LiveKit bridges ROS 2 graphs over WebRTC.
Multi-floor SLAM and a blocked robot deal
StrataSLAM keeps one map per floor in ROS 2, China blocks SoftBank's ABB Robotics purchase, and Meituan releases a 15,060 hour desktop VLA model.
Robot ID cards, weight space and drone noise
China drafts a lifetime ID code for every robot it builds, ros2_control ships Lyrical Luth breaking changes, and drone noise reaches the zoning board.
Cable robots and open robot weights
A room scale cable robot sells for 795 dollars, Verne opens a world action model, Stretch Gen 2 hardens, and ISO 21423 lands for mixed fleets.
China blocks SoftBank's ABB robotics deal
Beijing stops SoftBank's 5.4 billion dollar ABB Robotics purchase, Agility closes its first trading day, and ROS 2 removes topic statistics.
Robot imports become a security question
Washington opens trade talks on imported robots, Agility starts trading as AGLT, and two open-weight models rebuild manipulation data from force and gloves.
ISO 21423 gives mixed fleets a language
A3 publishes ISO 21423 for mixed mobile robot fleets, an open hardware cable robot covers a whole room, and Bazel builds reach ROS 2 Lyrical.
Intrinsic open-sources its robot runtime
Intrinsic put its industrial robot runtime on GitHub under Apache 2.0, Agility cleared its SPAC vote, and Tutor raised $75M to scale real-world robot data.
ROS 2 intra-process communication and composition explained
ROS 2 composition loads several nodes into one process, and intra-process communication passes messages between them without serialisation or a middleware hop.
The Stop Function Is Certified. Everything Feeding It Is Not.
A delivery robot read an advert as a green light and nine passengers fell. Its stop function worked as designed; the problem is the inputs are not verified.
ROS 2 zero-copy, humanoid tender data
ROS 2 weighs a zero-copy messaging redesign, VicOne reports 28 zero-days in physical AI tooling, and an open catalog shows what labs paid for humanoids.
Meta's humanoid Max, robot orders climb
Meta built a humanoid with Fourier in three months, North American robot orders rose 24.8 percent, and Hyundai cut robot debugging time with AI agents.
Agility shortfall, Audi humanoids, ATEX quadrupeds
Agility raises $465M instead of $620M, Audi tests wheeled humanoids for parts sequencing, and ANYmal X is certified for explosive atmospheres.
Section 232, Starship fault, BMW policies
Washington opens robot import negotiations, a Starship robot misreads a Tallinn signal, and BMW builds a humanoid data pipeline.
CircuitHub's Grid, A3 orders, world model tests
CircuitHub shows a factory-scale PCB robot, A3 reports a 24.8 percent order jump, and WorldOracle scores world models against real executions.
Ex-proof quadrupeds, batched planners, agent harnesses
ANYbotics certifies ANYmal X for explosive atmospheres, BMW passes a million automated car moves, and three open tools for planning and robot agents ship code.
Spot for ICE, Digit at GXO, ROS 2 agents
Boston Dynamics staff fail to stop an ICE Spot sale, Agility adds two GXO sites, Bedrock raises $600M, and a free ROS 2 to VLA course ships its code.
ROS 2 lifecycle nodes explained: states, transitions and launch
ROS 2 lifecycle nodes add a managed state machine to drivers and servers: configure, activate, deactivate and clean up in a deliberate order.
Dream-1, Alpamayo and robot data engines
Dream Labs opens a zero-shot robot API, Bolt picks NVIDIA Alpamayo for 25,000 Lucids, NVIDIA opens the GR00T data engine, and RoboStack merges four ROS repos.
Optimus line, VFA funding, lab agents
Tesla starts Optimus production in Fremont, Eka raises $150M for a vision-force-action model, AGCO signs Digit, and a benchmark scores agents on wet lab work.
Dream API, lab benchmarks, biometric suits
Dream Labs opens a $3/hour robot API trained on video, Agility's co-founder questions Digit 5, and delivery robots face Illinois biometric suits.
humanoidsphysical-aiworld-modelssynthetic-dataros2planningsimulationgazebomanufacturingteslaagility-roboticsbenchmarks
Optimus starts, Cosmos opens the pipeline
Tesla begins building production Optimus units in Fremont, NVIDIA opens Cosmos blueprints and training tools, and PlanSys2 4.0.0 covers PDDL 1.2 through PDDL+.
manipulationphysical-airobot-securityros2open-source-hardwarebenchmarksdelivery-robotsprivacyreinforcement-learningtactile-sensing
Force models, backdoored planners, open arms
Eka bets on force instead of vision, a trigger word hijacks LLM robot planners, and open hardware gets a dual arm platform and five hands.
How Nav2 works: planners, controllers, costmaps and behavior trees
Nav2 is the ROS 2 navigation stack: a behavior tree driving planner and controller servers over costmaps, with lifecycle nodes and recovery actions.
humanoidswarehouse-roboticssafetyindustrial-robotsinspectiontactile-sensingsim-to-realros2swiftbiohybrid-robots
Digit 5, Navy contracts, tactile data
Agility's Digit 5 bets on barrier-free humanoid safety, Gecko quadruples its Navy contract to $300M, and Daimon builds a tactile data pipeline.
ros2open-sourcephysical-aiindustrial-robotssimulationhumanoidsmanipulationbenchmarksrobot-datavla-modelssim-to-real
Intrinsic Core, AWS stack, Atlas hands
Intrinsic open sources its industrial robot stack, AWS packages an open Physical AI pipeline, and a new benchmark shows frontier models failing at control.
mars-roversautonomous-navigationautowareautonomous-vehiclesrobot-safetysimulationindustrial-robotsros2robot-programminghumanoids
Perseverance record and Autoware research center
Perseverance passes Opportunity's driving record using AutoNav, TIER IV and TUM open an Autoware research center, and SafeWorld funds robot safety simulation.
nvidiavla-modelshumanoidsbatteriessurgical-roboticsros2edge-aiindustrial-robotsrobot-foundation-modelsrobot-safety
Nemotron edge models and Digit 5 charging
NVIDIA ships open vision models sized for robot hardware, Agility names the battery supplier behind Digit 5, and Stryker invests in surgical robotics.
googlephysical-intelligencevla-modelsmanipulationsim-to-realros2planningindustrial-robotsconstruction-roboticsmachine-visionautonomous-vehiclesrobot-safety
Gemini 4 Argon and Pi API beta
Google's Gemini 4 Argon claims 87 percent on embodied reasoning, Physical Intelligence opens a robot model API, and BMW evaluates dexterous factory robots.
The Model Proposes, the Gate Disposes
Four releases in one week put the learned model in a proposing role and handed the state, the parameters and the motors to a deterministic layer.
boston-dynamicshumanoidsros2physical-ainvidiamanipulationteleoperationcobotsopen-sourcesim-to-realamazon-roboticswarehouse-roboticsindustrial-robots
Boston Dynamics' new CEO and Atlas hand
Boston Dynamics names Rohit Prasad CEO and shows a 13 DOF Atlas hand, Intrinsic open sources its core stack, and Amazon passes one million warehouse robots.
ROS 2 launch files explained: nodes, parameters and event handlers
ROS 2 launch files start a whole system: nodes, parameters, remappings, namespaces and event handlers. How launch and launch_ros split the work.
Isaac ROS 5.0 lands on Pixi
Isaac ROS 5.0 arrives as conda packages for Pixi, a 617 hour human motion dataset targets humanoid policies, and ros2_control 6.12.0 breaks deprecated APIs.
physical-airos2navigationsimulationmanipulationquadrupedfoundation-modelsreinforcement-learningnvidiaaws
Physical AI toolchain, a walking hand
AWS open sources a physical AI toolchain, an ETH Zurich hand walks on its fingers, and EasyNav 0.5.0 gives ROS 2 a new navigation stack.
Boston Dynamics picks Alexa's Prasad as CEO
Boston Dynamics hands the chief executive job to an AI product veteran, and two papers measure what VLA policy routing and recovery actually buy.
Siemens closes a solver, robots go local
Siemens closes OpenRadioss, Teradyne bets on AI factory robotics, and a CMU spinout raises $12M to validate generative AI robot safety.
ROS 2 executors and callback groups explained
How ROS 2 executors run callbacks, what callback groups change about concurrency, and why a synchronous service call inside a callback deadlocks.
Zero-copy ROS 2 and a $10 tactile skin
ROS 2 gains zero-copy GPU buffers, a mission state that survives restarts, and SoTa tactile skins that make human demonstrations count.
robot-safetyopen-source-hardwaremanipulationros2autonomous-vehiclessensor-fusionbenchmarksvla-modelslogistics
Mobile robot safety rules, open hand
A3 closes the user-side AMR safety standard, an open 15-DOF hand ships a ROS 2 driver, Tesla explains Robotaxi night limits, and benchmark means hide failures.
Runway bets robot policies on video
Runway's open-weight world action model learns control from video, ANYbotics opens a fleet platform, and an open quadruped runs Nav2 on a Jetson.
Atlas hand drops the pinky
Boston Dynamics' new Atlas hand trades a pinky for 13 degrees of freedom, NoDL lands for ROS 2, and two warehouse robot startups scale real deployments.
NVIDIA's OpenShell watchdog for robot agents
NVIDIA ships an open runtime and a hardware watchdog for robot agents, NASA traces its space arm trouble to the transporter, and ScaFi scales a swimming robot.
ROS 2 Quality of Service policies explained
How ROS 2 QoS policies work: reliability, durability, history, depth, deadline and liveliness, the preset profiles, and why a topic sometimes reaches nobody.
The Robot Stack Is Going Modular, and the Guard Layer Has No Home
HomeBody deletes the learned policy, FLUX 3 Action shrinks it to a checkpoint, and RoboHarm shows the frontier model that takes over refuses almost nothing.
Open 7B action model, all-linear hand
Black Forest Labs opens a 7B world action model that tops a public robot benchmark, a Duke lab builds a hand from linear motion, and HFlow opens data tooling.
PickNik to Qualcomm, Intrinsic goes open
Qualcomm buys the steward of MoveIt, Google's Intrinsic open sources its industrial stack, Boston Dynamics starts Atlas training, and a VLM drives a humanoid.
Qualcomm buys PickNik, keeps MoveIt open
Qualcomm acquires PickNik and keeps MoveIt open source, Arduino's VENTUNO Q targets robot builders, rclrs 0.8 ships, and Joby flies across the US autonomously.
ros2nvidia-isaacphysical-aivla-modelsmanipulationopen-sourceindustrial-roboticsjetsondiffusion-policy
Isaac ROS 5.0 lands at ROSCon
NVIDIA ships Isaac ROS 5.0 with agent skills, Intrinsic open sources its industrial robot runtime, and a new serving layer cuts VLA latency on Jetson Thor.
Atlas Metaplant opens, Halos safety stack
Boston Dynamics starts training Atlas inside Hyundai's Metaplant America, NVIDIA argues safety has to be a whole stack, and robot policies rarely refuse.
How to use rosbag2 to record and replay ROS 2 bags
rosbag2 captures ROS 2 topics, services and clock data into bags you can replay later. How recording, inspection, compression and playback work in ros2 bag.
Gorai, Jetson strike drone, humanoid recycling
A Go and NATS robotics framework, autonomous target selection running on a Jetson Orin Nano, and why retired humanoids are a hard recycling problem.
ros2gazebocobotsindustrial-roboticsphysical-airesearch-fundingrobot-securityvlamanipulationsimulation
Gazebo armhf EOL, NSF physical AI
Gazebo ends 32-bit ARM binaries, NSF opens a physical AI funding topic, Hirebotics adds line tracking and a rail, and a defense for backdoored VLA policies.
Digit 5, SoftBank RAI, JOY microgravity
Agility's Digit 5 adds a cooperative safety architecture, SoftBank moves to buy the Robotics and AI Institute, and Icarus tests a free-flying robot in microgravity.
Helix 2.5, OpenArm, Arm capability levels
Figure's Helix 2.5 works in 30 homes it has never seen, an open humanoid arm ships CAD and ROS 2 packages, and Arm maps the physical AI stack.
Map-free drone nav, ARM cross-compiling
An open ROS 2 and PX4 stack flies a drone through urban terrain without a map, colcon gains ARM cross-compiling, and rosbag2 learns to change topics mid-recording.
Digit 5, OpenRobOps, Gazebo armhf cutoff
Agility's Digit 5 humanoid targets barrier-free factory work, InOrbit open-sources a fleet operations stack, and Gazebo ends 32-bit ARM binaries.
Universal Robots Gen 7, Unitree UnifoLM
Universal Robots ships its Gen 7 cobot platform, Unitree opens a 6B humanoid foundation model, plus ROS 2 releases and new VLA safety work.
ROS 2 topics vs services vs actions
Topics stream continuous data, services answer a request, actions run long tasks with feedback. How the three ROS 2 interfaces work, and how to choose.
What is ROS 2?
ROS 2 is the open-source framework most modern robots run on. This guide covers its client libraries, middleware, nodes, topics, services, actions and tooling.