Reflections from ROSCon 2025 – Singapore 🇸🇬

Created on October 29, 2025

2025

Just wrapped up an amazing few days at ROSCon 2025 (October 27–29) here in Singapore — and wow, what an experience! From deep tech sessions to hallway chats with some of the brightest robotics minds, it was a reminder of how fast the ROS ecosystem is evolving.

Here are a few highlights and standout projects that truly stood out 👇

🔹 Key Updates

  • rmw_zenoh becomes Tier-1 Middleware

    Officially elevated to Tier-1 in ROS 2 Kilted Kaiju, enabling faster, more distributed, real-time communication.

  • Open-RMF Expands in Real Deployments

    Success stories at Changi General Hospital and Changi Airport showcase the power of open, coordinated multi-robot fleets.

  • New Special Interest Group (SIG) for Physical AI

    A new SIG for Physical AI was announced — aiming to make ROS the foundation for data collection and deployment of visual-motor policies and physical AI models, bridging the gap between hardware, datasets, and large-scale embodied intelligence.

  • NVIDIA Isaac GROOT 1.6

    Arriving mid-November, brings major upgrades — improved VLM backbone, diverse pretraining data, enhanced DiT and control, plus open-source code and weights on GitHub and Hugging Face.

Standout Projects

🧭 Planning, Simulation & ML Integration

  • Robotplan – Motion planning & control toolkit for ROS 2.

  • Genesis ROS – Connects ML simulators with ROS 2 for real-time, time-accelerated learning.

  • Crossflow – Rust-based workflow engine powering Open-RMF multi-agent coordination.

  • ROS 2 MCP Server – Bridges LLMs with ROS 2 via the Model Context Protocol, enabling natural-language robot interaction.

🧩 Debugging, Testing & Dev Tools

  • Replay Testing – Framework for automated tests against real robot data.

  • Rtest – Deterministic ROS 2 unit tests, eliminating flaky CI runs.

  • ros2bag_tools – Simplified command-line tools to cut, extract, and sync ROS 2 bag files.

  • Cockpit ROS 2 Diagnostics – Web-based GUI to monitor robot diagnostics and logs.

  • Custom Message Visualizer – Interactive visualization of custom ROS messages for faster debugging.

🎥 Vision & Streaming

🛠️ Workflow, Build & Management

  • Robocore CLI – Modular command-line tool for scalable ROS 2 builds and deployments.

  • launch_frontend_py – Simplifies ROS 2 launch configurations using declarative XML/YAML syntax.

  • rclrs (ROS 2 Rust) – Brings Rust’s memory safety, speed, and concurrency to ROS 2.

  • Pixi + RoboStack – Streamlined cross-platform ROS installation and dependency management.

💡 Closing Thoughts

Every year, ROSCon reminds me why I love this field — the openness, collaboration, and shared passion for building intelligent, connected robots.

As we move toward Physical AI, standardized data collection, and cross-domain integration, ROS continues to stand out as the backbone of modern robotics research and deployment.

PS: I might have missed a few great projects — feel free to explore more highlights and talks at roscon.ros.org/2025

📚 Useful ROS Resources