ROSCon UK 2026

ROSCon UK 2026 is the United Kingdom edition of the long-running Robot Operating System developer conference, taking place from 21 to 23 October 2026 in Edinburgh, Scotland. Hosted at the University of Edinburgh's Pollock Estate Complex on the Southside of the city, it is a three-day developers' gathering aimed at ROS users of every level, from newcomers to seasoned roboticists, and at anyone building robots, sensors, drivers, or autonomy software on the open-source ROS and ROS 2 stack.

What ROSCon UK is and who it is for

ROSCon UK is a community-driven, technical conference rather than a vendor expo. Following the inaugural 2025 edition in Edinburgh, the 2026 event is organised by the Tartan Robotics Collective in conjunction with the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF), the body that stewards ROS worldwide. The programme is built almost entirely from contributions submitted by the UK robotics community, so it reflects what British labs, start-ups, and industrial teams are actually shipping. It is designed for software engineers, research scientists, PhD students, and robotics companies who want to learn new tools, share working code, and meet the people behind the libraries they depend on.

Programme and themes

The three days combine technical talks, hands-on workshops and tutorials, lightning talks, and networking and social events. Talks run in a tight fifteen-minute format including questions, while workshops and tutorials span half or full days for deeper, participatory sessions. The call for proposals invites work across the full ROS landscape, including:

• New ROS packages, frameworks, and improvements to existing ones
• Case studies of unusual or demanding ROS deployments in the field
• Drivers and integration for specific robots, sensors, and platforms
• Standards, interoperability, best practices, and developer tooling
• ROS in commercial, research, and teaching environments

Reviewers weight relevance to the wider community, demonstrable impact, originality, and open-source availability of the underlying code, reinforcing the conference's open-source ethos. A gala dinner at the University of Edinburgh's historic Playfair Library gives attendees a memorable setting to continue conversations away from the technical sessions. Lightning talks, capped at two minutes each, round out the schedule and give first-time speakers a low-stakes way to share a project, a tool, or an idea with the room. The deliberate mix of formats means a newcomer can attend an introductory tutorial in the morning and follow a deep-dive case study from a production robotics team in the afternoon, all within the same venue.

What is notable this edition and how it connects to robotics trends

Edinburgh is a deliberate choice: it is one of the UK's strongest robotics and AI hubs, home to the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics and the National Robotarium, both hosts of the 2026 event. The organising committee draws on engineers and scientists from Locus Robotics, the University of Edinburgh, the National Robotarium, Touchlab, the University of Lincoln's Lincoln Centre for Autonomous Systems, Cranfield University, and Robotical, with Dr. Bence Magyar of Locus Robotics serving as general chair and Prof. Marc Hanheide of the University of Lincoln chairing the programme. That spread captures a defining trend of 2026 robotics: ROS 2 has moved firmly from the research bench into commercial deployment, powering warehouse fleets, assistive and service robots, and autonomous systems at scale. Discussions of middleware reliability, fleet management, real-time control, and the integration of learned and embodied-AI components with classical ROS pipelines sit squarely on the agenda the community keeps returning to. For practitioners, ROSCon UK is where the gap between an academic prototype and a fielded, maintainable robot gets debated in concrete, code-level terms.

Attending and registering

ROSCon UK 2026 expects in-person attendance across the three days in Edinburgh, with the programme released following the proposal review cycle that closed in mid-2026. Early registration opens after the acceptance notifications, and the organisers encourage attendees from all backgrounds and experience levels, with an explicit commitment to welcoming women, members of minority groups, and others under-represented in robotics. The city is well connected by rail via Edinburgh Waverley and by air through Edinburgh Airport, and the venue sits roughly twenty minutes from the centre by public transport. Prospective attendees should consult the official ROSCon UK site for current ticket details, the finalised schedule, and travel and accommodation guidance; pricing and exact session times are confirmed on the event website rather than estimated here. For UK-based roboticists and the international ROS community alike, it is one of the most practically useful robotics software events on the calendar.