ROSCon 2026 is shaping up to be another exciting year for the ROS community, bringing together developers, researchers, and robotics professionals to share the tools, techniques, and ideas shaping the future of robotics. Members of the Clearpath Robotics and Rockwell Automation teams will be leading sessions throughout the week, sharing practical insights drawn from real-world deployments and open-source development. Whether you’re looking to improve ROS 2 performance, streamline communication between robot subsystems, or enable coordinated control of mobile manipulators, these talks offer valuable takeaways you can apply to your own robotics projects.
Tuesday, September 22
Mastering the Jazzy RMW: A Performance-Driven Framework for ROS 2 Middleware Selection and Tuning
Nathan Van Heyst and Luis Camero, Clearpath Robotics by Rockwell Automation
Matt Bells and Andrei Ionescu, Rockwell Automation
Default RMW settings can fail as systems scale. Many teams rely on inherited tuning configurations that worked on previous projects but fail under new loads. This workshop replaces guesswork with a performance-driven framework for ROS 2 Jazzy. The session centers on systematic tuning and benchmarking through intensive hands-on labs. Participants will move beyond black-box fixes to configure and optimize Fast DDS, Cyclone DDS, and Zenoh. Using a multi-modal MCAP dataset, attendees will run high-scale stress tests on their own hardware to identify how middleware behavior has evolved since Humble. We will walk through concrete techniques for resolving real-world bottlenecks that only appear at scale. Attendees will leave with a reusable benchmarking workflow and the data-driven expertise to justify tuning decisions to stakeholders.
Thursday, September 24
Proton – Lightweight, Portable, Peer to Peer Internal Communication Protocol for Robotics
Tom Wallis, Rockwell Automation
Truly portable, middleware-agnostic communications protocol for embedded systems in real-world robots. An agnostic schema that works seamlessly with ROS 2. Proton is the new default communication scheme on Clearpath robots, starting with software Jazzy 2.9, and will be used in all future CPR and OTTO robots going forward. Link
Thursday, September 24
Whole-body Mobile Manipulation with MoveIt 2 and ros2_control
Stephanie Eng, Rockwell Automation
Mobile manipulators are growing in popularity, but often, the base and the arm are treated independently. Whole-body control lets you leverage the arm and base together to enable your robot to both be able to do more things, and do those things faster. This talk covers what whole-body control entails and what you’ll need to set up your robot for whole body control using MoveIt 2 and ros2_control. Link
If you are attending ROSCon 2026, be sure to add these talks and workshops to your schedule. Don’t forget to register soon to secure your spot and join thousands of robotics developers from around the world: https://roscon.ros.org/2026/#program