Modern Gazebo is no longer just a standalone app; it’s a library. This talk dives into embedding the Gazebo Server and Entity Component Manager (ECM) directly into Pythonic workflows. We demonstrate three compelling use cases: a reinforcement learning environment using Stable Baselines, an automated parameter-tuning pipeline for system identification in a ros2_control based ROS 2 system, and a custom Position-Based Dynamics (PBD) solver for rapid physics prototyping. Each of the examples show different entry points in Gazebo's Python API giving users flexibility and empowering them to use Python's large scientific and ML ecosystem with Gazebo.

Speakers:
Addisu Taddese, Intrinsic, Senior Software Engineer, Gazebo Tech Lead
Arjo Chakravarty, Intrinsic, Software Engineer

This talk presents an exciting integration of MuJoCo physics in Gazebo simulation. While MuJoCo is a staple for high-fidelity robotics manipulation and RL, and Gazebo is the standard for ROS-based systems, this integration offers developers the best of both worlds. We will specifically highlight the impact on robotic manipulation through demos, including gear meshing and humanoid walking, to showcase superior contact stability and accuracy. Attendees will learn to combine MuJoCo’s physics with Gazebo’s high fidelity rendering and sensor suite. Finally, we cover SDFormat/MJCF conversion and the ROS-Gz bridge to streamline sim-to-real transfer.

Speakers:
Sam Haves, Google
Addisu Taddese, Intrinsic, Senior Software Engineer, Gazebo Tech Lead

This talk will introduce a major upcoming change in Gazebo where we are switching from an in-house Entity Component Manager (ECM) implementation to a third party library (Entt). This change dramatically improved performance for worlds with a large number of entities (up to 500% RTF) and allows tighter integration with the ECM for higher performance, scalability and easier maintainability. This talk will give an overview of the change and introduce how users can leverage the ECM to improve performance in their applications.

https://github.com/gazebosim/gz-sim/pull/3447 is the draft PR with the feature that is currently being iterated on and broken down into smaller chunks for review / merge.

Speaker:
Luca Della Vedova, Intrinsic, Software Engineering Manager

URDF is widely used both inside and outside the ROS community. The canonical URDF parser in ROS (urdfdom) has been maintained by the ROS PMC but is being transferred to the ROS Controls PMC. To support this transition and ensure responsible evolution of the URDF spec, a versioning and releasing strategy has been followed to add features in new versions of the specification: URDF 1.1 and 1.2. This talk details the strategy and the long-requested new features, which include quaternion-based orientation, capsule geometry and extended joint limits including acceleration, deceleration, and jerk.

https://github.com/roboptim -> provides a way to calculate the capsules, however as the URDF doesn't support it, it adds a macro to the URDF, basically adding a cylinder and two spheres at each end to create the capsule.

Speakers:
Sai Kishor Kothakota, PAL Robotics, Robotics Engineer
Steve Peters, Intrinsic, Software Engineering Manager

We will show the work that was completed to provide cargo dependencies into the buildfarm, enabling developers to release their Rust based ROS packages into the existing ecosystem of tools.

Speakers:
Jorge Perez, Ekumenlabs
Scott Logan, Intrinsic, Software Engineer

This talk presents the annual "State of Gazebo," exploring a year of major performance gains and ROS alignment. It highlights performance improvements guided by extensive profiling, the new EnTT-based Entity Component Manager, MuJoCo physics integration, and Zenoh shared memory transport. It also covers updated release policies synchronizing Gazebo and ROS cadences, naming, and support windows, alongside the introduction of Rotary, a new release based on nightly builds. Join us to learn more about these milestones and discover many other exciting updates!

Speaker:
Addisu Taddese, Intrinsic, Senior Software Engineer, Gazebo Tech Lead

Our ROS maintainers, like most open source maintainers, are stretched thin and could really use your support! The good news is that anyone with a moderate amount of software engineering experience is welcome to help them out by performing a pull request review.

This talk will provide an introduction to the fastest and easiest way for you to contribute to the ROS project: performing PR reviews. We’ll discuss both the scope of the problem and how you can perform a kind, courteous, and effective PR review in the amount of time it takes you to drink a cup of coffee.

Speakers:
Kat Scott, Intrinsic, Developer Relations Engineer

Speaker:
Michael Grey, Intrinsic, Software Engineering Manager

Speaker:
Scott Logan, Intrinsic, Software Engineer

Rigid paths often break in busy environments, leading to constant delays and unstable replanning. We explore a move toward dynamic “Safe Zones,” giving robots the autonomy to navigate obstacles without breaking the global mutli-agent plan. This method stays efficient at scale while ensuring reliable performance in messy, real-world spaces. By previewing Open-RMF’s move toward shared spatial data, we show how these zones foster better coordination between systems. This shift provides a transparent look at the future of interoperability, helping diverse fleets work together seamlessly in robust deployments.

Speakers:
Arjo Chakravarty, Intrinsic, Software Engineer
Xiyu Oh, Intrinsic, Software Engineer

Bazel is an open-source build tool from Google designed for scalability and correctness. With the introduction of Bazel modules, runfiles and the cc_shared_library rule, it is now possible to build entire ROS distributions from source with Bazel. In this presentation we’ll introduce the ROS Central Registry, which hosts Bazel modules for ROS Lyrical releases. Our modules make it simple and easy to build ROS packages in a granular way. We are also proud to offer a shared remote build cache to the community to help build ROS projects from scratch with mind-boggling speed!

Starting point for the ROS central Registry (RCR) project: https://github.com/intrinsic-opensource/ros-central-registry
https://intrinsic-opensource.github.io/ros-central-registry/

Speaker:
Andrew Symington, Intrinsic, Senior Software Engineer, ROS

ROS Actions are powerful, but that power comes with great responsibility. Action servers need to transition goals through state machines with 6 states and 5 transitions. Action clients need to juggle 3 services and 2 topics, synchronizing their data flows. Combine this with the long-running nature of actions, and you have a doozy of a programming problem.

Async paradigms have reshaped how concurrency is handled in modern programming. The rclrs library takes full advantage of async Rust to reimagine how Action servers and clients can be implemented ergonomically, resulting in actions that are easy to compose and concurrency that can be understood at a glance._‍

_‍Speaker:
Michael Grey, Intrinsic, Software Engineering Manager

The AI for Industry Challenge is a global competition tackling one of manufacturing's hardest manipulation problems: robotic cable insertion for server assembly. To enable broad community participation, we built an open-source ROS 2 toolkit featuring a high-fidelity Gazebo digital twin, a state-of-the-art impedance controller, cross-simulator support for MuJoCo and Isaac Lab, and LeRobot integration for data collection and policy training. This talk presents the toolkit, lessons learned from running a multi-phase sim-to-real challenge with thousands of participants, and how it has emerged as a blueprint for industrial-grade Physical AI on ROS 2.

Speakers: 
Ian Chen, Intrinsic, Software Engineering Manager
Jimmy Baraglia, Intrinsic, Senior Staff Roboticist