{"id":134085,"date":"2026-09-30T09:53:02","date_gmt":"2026-09-30T09:53:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.seeedstudio.com\/blog\/?p=134085"},"modified":"2026-09-30T10:13:17","modified_gmt":"2026-09-30T10:13:17","slug":"%f0%9f%87%a8%f0%9f%87%a6-roscon-global-2026-toronto-wrap-upiros-2026-pittsburgh-underway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.seeedstudio.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/30\/%f0%9f%87%a8%f0%9f%87%a6-roscon-global-2026-toronto-wrap-upiros-2026-pittsburgh-underway\/","title":{"rendered":"\ud83c\udde8\ud83c\udde6 ROSCon Global 2026 Toronto Wrap-Up|IROS 2026 Pittsburgh Underway"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Sept 22\u201324, Toronto hosted ROSCon Global 2026, the ROS community’s annual flagship conference. This year’s mascot: a helmet-wearing ROS turtle swinging a hockey stick \u2014 but what happened inside the venue was far more hardcore. AI giants moved their crown jewels into open source, and the ROS ecosystem is shifting gears toward one direction: Physical AI<\/strong>. As a Silver Sponsor, Seeed Studio made its ROSCon debut at Booth #13<\/strong> and witnessed it all firsthand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\ud83d\udd25 One-sentence summary of this year’s conference<\/strong>: it turned “Physical AI” from a buzzword into a pile of code you can actually download, run, and verify.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\ud83d\udd13 The giants open-sourced their crown jewels.<\/strong> Alphabet’s Intrinsic announced Intrinsic Core<\/strong> under Apache 2.0 \u2014 the real-time control framework ICON, motion & grasp planning, Gazebo simulation services, camera calibration, and ROS drivers, plus OMTS<\/strong>, a reference implementation for CNC machine tending. NVIDIA launched Isaac ROS 5.0<\/strong> onsite: ROS Lyrical + Ubuntu 24.04 support, agentic workflows, and 5.5\u00d7 faster FoundationPose inference \u2014 and the official blog gave us a shout-out: Seeed Studio is applying Isaac ROS on the reBot<\/em> Arm<\/em>, fusing accelerated perception, spatial understanding, and motion planning on NVIDIA Jetson Thor.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read the NVIDIA blog: https:\/\/blogs.nvidia.com\/blog\/isaac-ros-5-0-agentic-open-source-robotics\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u26a1 Zero-copy became the new “infrastructure topic.”<\/strong> LLM inference, point clouds, and tensors are now standard payloads in robot software stacks, and data movement is becoming the bottleneck: NVIDIA’s keynote covered near-zero-overhead tensor\/point-cloud transport, Ekumen proposed REP-0157<\/strong> for universal zero-copy across C\/C++\/Python, and the ros2_control workshop taught how to embed RL inference engines directly into controllers. The community-released ROS<\/strong> 2 Lyrical (<\/strong>LTS<\/strong>, supported through 2031)<\/strong> also ships built-in zero-copy and lower-CPU executors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\ud83c\udfed The agenda went full industrial.<\/strong> AMD took the exclusive Platinum sponsorship slot and delivered the opening keynote on the Physical AI “perceive\u2013reason\u2013decide\u2013act” loop; talk titles slid from “libraries & frameworks tutorials” toward Mines, Motors, and Manipulation<\/em> \u2014 mines, racetracks, kitchens; and the OSRA Physical AI SIG reported on its first year. Last year, Physical AI was a brand-new SIG; this year, it was the main storyline of the entire conference. And by the way \u2014 ROSCon China 2026 is on the way.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

ROS standardized how we build robots. Now AI agents, foundation models, simulation, and increasingly capable edge compute are starting to grow on top of that open foundation. The distance between “I have an idea” and “I can make a machine perceive, reason, and act” keeps getting shorter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\ud83e\uddbe We’re shortening that distance too.<\/strong> At our booth, visitors got hands-on with buttery-smooth teleoperation of the reBot Arm<\/a> \u2014 and watched it perform real-time teleoperation inside the NVIDIA Isaac simulation environment. The crowd never thinned, swapping dev stories and troubleshooting questions. That’s the magic of an open-source community.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\ud83e\udd1d Onsite takeaways beyond expectations<\/strong>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n