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ROSCon is the developer conference for the Robot Operating System. It has been held annually since 2012 and is organized by Open Robotics, the umbrella name for the Open Source Robotics Foundation and its initiatives; the first edition was run by a committee drawn from Willow Garage, Clearpath Robotics, ETH Zurich and Heartland Robotics.[32][1] From 2012 to 2025 every edition was billed the same way, as "a developers' conference, in the model of PyCon and BoostCon" (the 2026 site keeps "a developers' conference" but drops the comparison), and the program is built from community-submitted workshops, technical talks, tutorials, lightning talks and self-organized Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions.[1][2] From 2026 the flagship event is branded ROSCon Global, to distinguish it from the growing set of regional ROSCons.[3]

The fifteenth edition, ROSCon Global 2026, was held at the Sheraton Centre Toronto in Toronto, Canada on 22-24 September 2026.[1] A community recap put attendance at 1,000, and several companies timed product and licensing announcements to the event, including NVIDIA, which released Isaac ROS 5.0 on the opening day.[4][5] The next edition, ROSCon Global 2027, was announced for Krakow, Poland on 12-14 October 2027.[1]

Format

The first two editions were two-day events made up of 30-to-40-minute technical talks and tutorials, with sessions of five-minute lightning talks scheduled just-in-time at the conference and open space for BoF meetings and impromptu hacking.[2][6] The target talk length shrank to 10-30 minutes from 2018 onwards, and the conference has spanned three calendar days since 2022, when a day of pre-conference workshops was added ahead of the two talk days, and from 2024 the organizers described the event itself as a three-day program, with the first day given over to paid workshops and free BoF sessions.[18][8]

Proposals are reviewed by a program committee that evaluates "fit, impact, and balance", and acceptance is competitive. ROSCon 2015 was a single-track conference whose program committee accepted 21 of 70 submitted presentations, a 30 percent acceptance rate.[9] Talks are recorded and the slides collected; every edition keeps a permanent archive site with the program, talk recordings and, in some cases, speaker slides, and the archive is linked from the current year's site.[1] Talks from the 2015 through 2019 editions were additionally assigned DOIs under the 10.36288 prefix so they can be cited formally.[9][11][15][7][10]

Since 2016 the conference has run a ROSCon Diversity Scholarship Program, launched that year "to help make ROSCon 2016 more representative of the global ROS community".[11] Each scholarship covers one complimentary registration, four nights of hotel accommodation and a travel stipend; eligibility is aimed at groups traditionally underrepresented in robotics, and previous recipients may not reapply.[3] The scholarship deadline is deliberately set well before the call-for-proposals deadlines to allow for travel planning and visa processing.[12] ROSCon also publishes and enforces an anti-harassment code of conduct that applies to attendees, speakers, sponsors and volunteers, and that explicitly binds exhibitor booth staff.[1]

Sponsorship is tiered (Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze and a Startup Alley tier for early-stage companies) with add-ons for the reception, lunches, the diversity scholarships, the free live stream and video archive, the Whova conference app, and live captioning and translation.[13] Registration has repeatedly sold out: ROSCon 2015 in Hamburg was the first edition to sell out entirely, with no on-site registration offered.[9]

For most of its history the conference was scheduled adjacent to a major academic robotics conference so attendees could combine trips. ROSCon 2012 and 2013 ran immediately after ICRA.[2][6] ROSCon 2014 fell between IMTS and IROS, and the 2015 edition was announced as taking place in Hamburg immediately following IROS.[14] The 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2022 editions were each scheduled immediately before IROS, in 2017 at the same Vancouver venue.[11][15][7][10][18]

Editions

YearEventCityDatesVenue
2012ROSCon 2012St. Paul, Minnesota, USA19-20 MayDoubleTree by Hilton St Paul Downtown[2]
2013ROSCon 2013Stuttgart, Germany11-12 MayUniversity of Stuttgart campus, Pfaffenwaldring 47 (hall V47.01)[6]
2014ROSCon 2014Chicago, Illinois, USA12-13 SeptemberPalmer House[14]
2015ROSCon 2015Hamburg, Germany3-4 OctoberUniversity of Hamburg[9]
2016ROSCon 2016Seoul, South Korea8-9 OctoberConrad Seoul[11]
2017ROSCon 2017Vancouver, Canada21-22 SeptemberVancouver Convention Centre[15]
2018ROSCon 2018Madrid, Spain29-30 SeptemberNH Collection Eurobuilding[7]
2019ROSCon 2019Macau31 October - 1 November (workshops 30 October)Conrad Macao, Cotai Central[10]
2020ROS World 2020online12 Novembervirtual event platform[16]
2021ROS World 2021online20-21 Octobervirtual event platform[17]
2022ROSCon 2022Kyoto, Japan19-21 OctoberKyoto International Conference Center[18]
2023ROSCon 2023New Orleans, Louisiana, USA18-20 OctoberThe New Orleans Hyatt Regency[19]
2024ROSCon 2024Odense, Denmark21-23 OctoberThe Odeon concert hall[8]
2025ROSCon 2025Singapore27-29 OctoberSuntec Singapore Convention and Exhibition Centre[20]
2026ROSCon Global 2026Toronto, Canada22-24 SeptemberSheraton Centre Toronto[1]
2027ROSCon Global 2027 (announced)Krakow, Poland12-14 Octobernot yet announced[1]

Expanded article table

Early years

The inaugural ROSCon ran in St. Paul, Minnesota on 19-20 May 2012, immediately after ICRA, and videos of every talk were posted within two weeks of the event.[2] Stuttgart followed in May 2013, with the organizers citing "the success of the inaugural ROSCon in St. Paul, Minnesota" as the reason to move the event to Germany.[6] From 2014 the conference moved to the autumn, and the host region has rotated between North America, Europe and Asia.

The organizers called Seoul in 2016 record-breaking, with "over 450 attendees and a 60% increase over last year in sponsorship".[11] It was also where ROBOTIS presented the TurtleBot 3, in a talk titled "Introducing the Turtlebot3" by Yoonseok Pyo, Yoshihiro Shibata, Ryuwoon Jung and Taehoon Lim.[11]

COVID-19 and ROS World

ROSCon 2020 was replaced by ROS World 2020, a free, live-streamed half-day event on 12 November 2020 built from pre-recorded videos, live talks, social events and panels. The organizers used it to test a "federated" model in which affiliated communities such as Autoware and DroneCode ran their own parallel tracks, and curated speakers rather than running a full call for proposals.[16]

An in-person ROSCon 2021 in New Orleans was planned and ticketed, then cancelled. The organizers wrote that a surge in COVID-19 cases, the cancellation of other large Louisiana events and a renewed state emergency declaration meant "it simply isn't a suitable time to gather in large groups in Louisiana", and replaced it with ROS World 2021 online on 20-21 October 2021, refunding or exchanging tickets and moving speakers' talks and workshops online.[17] New Orleans eventually hosted ROSCon 2023 instead.[19]

Return to in-person

Kyoto in 2022 was the first in-person edition after the pandemic, and the organizers thanked "all 801 attendees from 38 countries".[18] ROSCon 2023 in New Orleans brought together over 700 developers from 42 countries; its two talk days ran two concurrent tracks across fourteen sessions with fifty-four talks in total, plus two lightning talk sessions with more than forty speakers, and the Dronecode Foundation held its PX4 Developers' Summit immediately afterwards in the same venue.[31]

Odense in 2024 was the first edition the organizers themselves billed as a three-day program, mixing workshops, technical talks and tutorials.[8] Open Robotics announced on the opening day that the edition had sold out entirely, and expected 985 attendees, 46 sponsors and 28 exhibitors, plus representatives of all 45 Open Source Robotics Alliance member organizations; the program included seven workshops, and the event ran with support from the city of Odense during its Week of Robotics.[32] Singapore in 2025 was the fourteenth edition.[20] Soliciting 2026 sponsors, the executive committee said it was aiming for over 1,000 attendees and projected, "if this event is anything like ROSCon 2025", that attendees would represent "350+ companies in the field of robotics", "50+ countries" and "60+ universities", with 80 percent "filling roles as engineers or executive management".[13]

ROSCon Global and regional editions

Alongside the flagship event, a network of regional ROSCons has grown up, some run by local organizations rather than the OSRF. The archive on the official site lists regional editions going back to a 2014 event in Hong Kong, with Japanese editions from 2018, France from 2019, Spain and Germany and India from 2023, China from 2024, the United Kingdom from 2025, and Belgium, Korea, Singapore and Turkey appearing in 2026.[1]

In March 2026 Katherine Scott announced on ROS Discourse that the flagship event would add "Global" to its name: "Since we're planning to hold at least nine regional ROSCons this year (Korea, Japan, China, India, Germany, France, Croatia, United Kingdom, Spain) and potentially more, we thought it was time to add 'Global' to the name of our world-wide ROSCon event."[3] The call for proposals repeated that the moniker was adopted "to reflect our growing international community and the many regional ROSCons happening worldwide".[12]

Two 2026 regional editions illustrate the pattern. ROSCon JP 2026 was held in Tsukuba, Japan on 4-5 August 2026, its first two-day program, organized by the ROSCon JP association jointly with Open Robotics.[21] ROSCon China 2026 was pre-announced in May 2026 for Shanghai on 16-17 October 2026, in person with live streaming.[22]

ROSCon Global 2026

Logistics and pricing

ROSCon Global 2026 ran 22-24 September 2026 at the Sheraton Centre Toronto, 123 Queen Street West. Workshops occupied day 1 (Tuesday 22 September) for an additional fee on top of conference registration.[1] Ticket prices were $250 (early student), $575 (early general) until 12 July 2026; $350 and $725 at regular price; and $500 and $1,025 late, all in US dollars, with workshops adding $50 to $75 for students and $100 to $150 for others. Thanks to a grant from Destination Toronto, the organizers extended regular-price sales to 27 August 2026. The negotiated hotel rate was C$449 (roughly US$338) per night plus tax.[1]

Two free Vimeo live streams carried the Grand Ballroom West/Centre and Grand Ballroom East rooms, with recordings promised a few weeks after the event.[23]

The 2026 organizing team was led by general chair Vanessa Yamzon Orsi and content chair Geoff Biggs, both of Open Robotics, with community liaisons Vicky Brasseur (Open Robotics), Stephanie Eng (Rockwell Automation), Tully Foote and Kat Scott (both Intrinsic). Ryan Gariepy of Rockwell Automation was local chair and, with OSRF board chair Brian Gerkey, an advisor. Juan Miguel Jimeno and Kimberly McGuire chaired the program committee, and event management firm MeetGreen handled logistics.[1]

Program

The published day 1 schedule listed ten workshop sessions and nine Birds of a Feather sessions, alongside sponsor and OSRA-member drop-in sessions. Workshops included aerial robotics with PX4 and ROS, a MoveIt motion-planning fundamentals session, declarative ROS workspaces with Pixi and RoboStack, an AMD and Robotec.ai session on agentic AI from cloud to robot, and two NVIDIA sessions.[24]

Days 2 and 3 used two parallel ballroom tracks plus plenary blocks. The opening keynote block on 23 September paired "Space ROS's First Flight Mission: Challenges & Safety" with NVIDIA's "Accelerated Memory Transports: Hardware accelerated pipelines for physical AI in ROS Lyrical". Thematic sessions covered AI (including a Physical AI SIG talk, "From Bags to Tensors: Getting ROS Data Ready for Physical AI" and "Rosetta: Training LeRobot Policies on ROS Robots"), simulation (several MuJoCo talks and a Gazebo optimization deep dive), mobile robots and Nav2, new ROS features, development and maintenance, communications and performance, fleets and applications, tooling, and motion planning and manipulation. Project update slots were given to ROS, ros-controls, Gazebo, Open-RMF and Infrastructure. Brian Gerkey and Vicky Brasseur gave the closing remarks.[24]

Sponsors

AMD was the platinum sponsor and also sponsored the live stream and video archive. The seventeen gold sponsors were Canonical, Clearpath, Dexory, Dimensional, Foxglove, Intel, Intrinsic, Locus Robotics, Singapore's National Robotics Program, NEXTCHIP, NVIDIA, NXP, QNX, Qualcomm, RealSense, Roboto AI and Siemens. Silver sponsors included AgileX, Aurora, Botasys, Edge Impulse, Ekumen, eYs3D, FictionLab, Field AI, Huawei, Innate, JFrog, Kinova, Main Street Autonomy, OSCP, Ouster, PickNik Robotics, Quanser, Red Hat, ROS-Industrial, Seeed Studio, Seegrid, Upside Robotics and UVIFY. The 10 September sponsor announcement listed nine bronze sponsors, Autoware, b-robotized, D-Robotics, eSol, Hello Robot, Honu Robotics, Resim.ai, Simbe and Zettascale, while the conference site's bronze row shows SignalFlag in place of Resim.ai, and the Startup Alley tier carried 10Things, Botbot, CraftifAI, Glidance, Looper Robotics, Olive Robotics, Smarobix and Vicharak.[25] SignalFlag also ran a day 1 sponsor drop-in session.[24] Intrinsic sponsored the reception, Qualcomm the lunches, and Locus Robotics both the diversity scholarships and the live translation service.[1][25]

Announcements

NVIDIA released Isaac ROS 5.0 on 22 September 2026, the opening day. NVIDIA describes Isaac ROS as a collection of GPU-accelerated packages built on ROS and says it brings NVIDIA accelerated computing, physical AI models and production-ready libraries "to the nearly 1.3 million ROS users". The release added support for ROS Lyrical and Ubuntu 24.04, a set of reusable Isaac "skills" for setup and manipulation that both developers and AI agents can call, agent-ready documentation, a FoundationStereo fine-tuning skill, an agent-ready FoundationPose inference library that NVIDIA says tracks object position and orientation up to 5.5 times faster, and a standalone pick-and-place skill. NVIDIA also said it worked with the Open Source Robotics Alliance to contribute a standard data-handling interface to ROS Lyrical, with CUDA as the worked example for GPU acceleration, and that Isaac ROS 5.0 runs across NVIDIA Jetson from Orin Nano to Jetson Thor. The blog post lists ecosystem work from RealSense, Intrinsic, Seeed Studio, Magna, prefix.dev, Foxglove, Flexiv, Ekumen, Ouster, Mentee Robotics, Universal Robots, ROBOTIS, Field AI and Noble Machines.[5]

Also on 22 September 2026, OSRF chief technology officer Geoffrey Biggs announced that Red Hat Enterprise Linux had become a Tier 1 supported platform for ROS, meaning the full ROS distribution is run through continuous integration, performance tests and packaging jobs on it daily and for every change. Fedora Linux became a Tier 3 (community-maintained) platform at the same time.[26]

In a recap published on 28 September 2026, Sebastian Castro, a NASA Johnson Space Center contractor who also runs Respite Robotics, reported "1000 attendees from all over the world" at the Toronto event and summarized the announcements clustered around it: RealSense was acquired by Cognex and PickNik by Qualcomm, Intrinsic open sourced parts of its previously proprietary core platform, NVIDIA released Isaac ROS 5.0, and NASA announced the Deep Space Autonomous Robotics Challenge (DSpARC) for early 2027. Castro also highlighted a NASA-presented mujoco_ros2_control talk.[4] The Gazebo project committee's 28 September 2026 minutes likewise recorded "widespread momentum around MuJoCo at ROSCon" as an agenda item in its ROSCon debrief.[27]

NVIDIA's participation

NVIDIA was a gold sponsor of ROSCon Global 2026 and published its own conference guide on the NVIDIA Developer Forums four days before the event, listing a four-part program: two Isaac workshops on day 1 ("From URDF to USD: A Complete Pipeline for High-Fidelity ROS Simulation in NVIDIA Isaac Sim", 8am to noon, and "Contact-Rich Manipulation with Isaac Lab + Isaac ROS", 1pm to 5pm, both in the Dominion N room), a drop-in session on portable and agentic robot policies in ROS 2, and the ROS Lyrical accelerated-memory-transports keynote slot on 23 September.[28][24] NVIDIA engineers also ran daily informal meetups at the Dual Citizen Coffee inside the Sheraton: a welcome happy hour on 22 September, an Isaac Sim and Isaac ROS session on 23 September, and an agent skills and workflows session on 24 September, with a Jetson Thor developer kit given away at the end of the week.[28]

After the conference, the NVIDIA Robotics account posted: "The best part of #ROSCon? The community. Thank you to everyone who joined our developer meetup, connected with our experts and partners, and took part in hands-on workshops exploring the NVIDIA Isaac platform and ROS."[29]

NVIDIA is also a platinum member of the Open Source Robotics Alliance, alongside Canonical, Intrinsic and Qualcomm.[30]

Organizers

ROSCon is organized by Open Robotics, which the organization describes as "the umbrella term for the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) and its initiatives". The OSRF was founded in 2012 and is a California nonprofit public benefit corporation exempt under section 501(c)(3); Vanessa Yamzon Orsi is its chief executive and Geoffrey Biggs its chief technology officer.[32][26] The 2026 conference site carries an Open Source Robotics Foundation copyright notice, and the executive committee used an openrobotics.org address.[1] Technical governance of OSRF projects sits with the Open Source Robotics Alliance (OSRA), described on its own site as "an initiative of Open Robotics to organize and strengthen project governance and community involvement" under a mixed membership and meritocratic model.[30] OSRA member organizations are prominent in the ROSCon sponsor roster, and the 2026 program carried a separate "OSRA Sponsor Session" track.[25][24]

References

  1. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6 ^7 ^8 ^9 ^10 ^11 ^12 ^13 ^14ROSCon Global 2026. roscon.ros.org/2026
  2. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5ROSCon 2012 | The ROS developer conference. roscon.ros.org/2012
  3. ^1 ^2 ^3Katherine Scott. "ROSCon Global 2026 Logo + Diversity Scholarships." ROS Discourse, 2 March 2026. discourse.ros.org/...52855
  4. ^1 ^2Sebastian Castro. "Conference Season 2026: ROSCon and IROS." Robotic Sea Bass, 28 September 2026. roboticseabass.com/...-season-2026-roscon-and-iros
  5. ^1 ^2Katie Washabaugh. "NVIDIA Isaac ROS 5.0 Advances Agentic, Open Source Robotics Development." NVIDIA Blog, 22 September 2026. blogs.nvidia.com/...0-agentic-open-source-robotics
  6. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4ROSCon 2013. roscon.ros.org/2013
  7. ^1 ^2 ^3ROSCon 2018. roscon.ros.org/2018
  8. ^1 ^2 ^3ROSCon 2024. roscon.ros.org/2024
  9. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4ROSCon 2015. roscon.ros.org/2015
  10. ^1 ^2 ^3ROSCon 2019. roscon.ros.org/2019
  11. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6ROSCon 2016. roscon.ros.org/2016
  12. ^1 ^2Katherine Scott. "Call for Proposals: Global ROSCon 2026 in Toronto." ROS Discourse, 12 March 2026. discourse.ros.org/...53171
  13. ^1 ^2Katherine Scott. "ROSCon Global 2026: Call for Sponsors." ROS Discourse, 24 March 2026. discourse.ros.org/...53498
  14. ^1 ^2ROSCon 2014 | The ROS Developer Conference. roscon.ros.org/2014
  15. ^1 ^2 ^3ROSCon 2017. roscon.ros.org/2017
  16. ^1 ^2ROS World 2020. roscon.ros.org/...2020
  17. ^1 ^2ROS World 2021. roscon.ros.org/...2021
  18. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4ROSCon 2022. roscon.ros.org/2022
  19. ^1 ^2ROSCon 2023. roscon.ros.org/2023
  20. ^1 ^2ROSCon 2025. roscon.ros.org/2025
  21. ^HansRobo. "ROSCon JP 2026 in つくば 開催決定！" ROS Discourse, 13 February 2026. discourse.ros.org/...52491
  22. ^xinyu. "Pre-announcing ROSCon China 2026." ROS Discourse, 23 May 2026. discourse.ros.org/...55027
  23. ^Katherine Scott. "ROSCon Global 2026 Live Stream." ROS Discourse, 23 September 2026. discourse.ros.org/...58340
  24. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5ROSCon Global 2026 Event Schedule (Whova agenda widget embedded on roscon.ros.org/2026). whova.com/...QFeqLXgsno%40B1dPYwwKCrevhtaiR2l24%3D
  25. ^1 ^2 ^3Katherine Scott. "ROSCon Global 2026 Sponsors and Exhibitors." ROS Discourse, 10 September 2026. discourse.ros.org/...58020
  26. ^1 ^2Geoffrey Biggs. "Open Robotics announces Red Hat Enterprise Linux Tier 1 support for ROS." Open Robotics, 22 September 2026. openrobotics.org/...e-linux-tier-1-support-for-ros
  27. ^"Gazebo PMC Meeting Minutes 2026-09-28." ROS Discourse, 29 September 2026. discourse.ros.org/...58502
  28. ^1 ^2amelian. "Community Guide to ROSCon 2026 - Toronto." NVIDIA Developer Forums, 18 September 2026. forums.developer.nvidia.com/...383671
  29. ^NVIDIA Robotics (@NVIDIARobotics). Post on X, 29 September 2026. x.com/...2105009719555559469
  30. ^1 ^2Open Source Robotics Alliance. osralliance.org
  31. ^Open Robotics. "ROSCon 2023 Recap." 9 November 2023. openrobotics.org/...roscon-2023-recap
  32. ^1 ^2 ^3Vanessa Yamzon Orsi. "Open Robotics Announces Sold-Out ROSCon 2024." Open Robotics, 21 October 2024. openrobotics.org/...roscon2024pr

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Reviewer note: Independently fact-checked 1 Oct 2026 against every edition's official archive site, ROS Discourse and NVIDIA's ROSCon materials; 12 defects corrected incl. the three-day format beginning in 2022

Cite this page: AI Wiki. "ROSCon." aiwiki.ai, updated 1 Oct 2026, fact-checked 1 Oct 2026. CC BY 4.0. https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/roscon

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