robot-data-diff is a new Apache-2.0 licensed CLI tool that diffs any two revisions of LeRobot datasets, either from local directories or Hugging Face repo IDs. It supports LeRobot v2.1 and v3.0 formats and generates per-episode statistics including frame counts, action stats, idle ratios, and action spikes, plus an HTML report. The tool runs CPU-only without downloading video files, requiring no prior tracking setup or commit workflow.

swift-ros2 3.0.0 consolidates the project into three packages under a new GitHub organization. The runtime now defaults to upstream rcl on Apple platforms, falling back to a pure-Swift wire implementation only where rcl is unavailable. Generated common_interfaces and full action/service support with type-hash-based wire interop are included. The library supports iOS 16+, macOS 13+, visionOS, Linux, Windows, and Android.

Mert Güler released world-collection, a set of 42 2D plan-based simulation environments for Gazebo Harmonic. The collection includes mazes, offices, warehouses, forests, real-world place replicas, moving obstacle scenarios, and challenge-oriented worlds. It is intended for testing and benchmarking navigation, exploration, LiDAR, and robot model setups in ROS-based projects.

ROBOTIS researchers tested three imitation learning approaches on a bimanual paper cup unstacking and stacking task using their AI Worker platform with dual HX5-D20 hands (54-DoF total). A baseline ACT policy using only RGB cameras and joint states failed completely. Adding raw tactile pressure arrays as MLP-projected tokens improved grasp stability but still only achieved 10% success. The ViTacFormer architecture, which first predicts future tactile states from multimodal history before conditioning actions on those predictions, reached 40% success. The work includes published code, video, and documentation.

The ros2_pulse tool, an LD_PRELOAD probe for ROS 2, has released version 0.6.0. This update enables the monitoring of rclpy nodes by hooking the rmw_take tracepoint and introduces specific tracking for loaned messages. The tool provides metrics via Prometheus and Grafana for visualizing topic rates and node liveness.

The PlanSys2 project is introducing two major updates: Kairos, a new default temporal and numeric PDDL planner, and STNBTBuilder, a new default behavior tree builder. Kairos is a standalone C++ library that outperforms several existing planners in benchmarks, while STNBTBuilder enables better parallelism and required concurrency in robot plans. These changes will arrive in the ROS 2 Rolling distribution first.

The RoboShield v2 project has transitioned from a passive watchdog to an active inline gateway designed to protect ROS 2 robots. Built with Rust and rclrs, the gateway sits between untrusted networks and the robot domain, acting as a bridge between two different domain IDs. It inspects incoming commands for anomalies such as invalid joint limits, NaN/inf values, and unauthorized publishers, triggering a lockdown if security is breached.

RobotLens is a native robotics engineering workspace designed to consolidate fragmented ROS 2 workflows. It integrates visualization, debugging, diagnostics, and simulation tools into one connected environment to reduce the need for switching between multiple terminals and applications. The project currently supports ROS 2, Zenoh, Gazebo, and MuJoCo.

VizMini2 is a new Android app designed for ROS 2 developers to interact with robots using mobile devices. It provides an RViz-like 3D interface, teleoperation capabilities, and diagnostic tools. The app acts as a native DDS participant, communicating directly with robot nodes over the network.

Rokoko has released an update to its Device SDK, which serves as the foundation for the ROS 2 bridge used with Smartgloves II. The update focuses on improving USB stream robustness during abrupt closures and introduces new firmware for the Smartgloves II. Additionally, a new pinch detector example has been added to recognize various finger movements.

DendROS is a new open-source utility designed to manage the complex terminal output generated by ROS 2 launch files. It allows users to group nodes by color and labels using a YAML configuration, providing a dedicated viewer for searching, filtering, and scrolling through logs without interrupting the running launch. The tool also highlights crashes, tracebacks, and runtime parameter changes.