Robotics Software | Updated 2026-04-25
ROS 2 Kilted and tactile sensor data pipelines
A robotics software update on ROS 2 Kilted, rosbag2, ros2_control, force/torque broadcasters, and filter chains for tactile data workflows.
Updated technical brief - April 2026
What changed
ROS 2 Kilted Kaiju is the current stable ROS 2 distribution as of April 2026, while Jazzy and Humble remain supported long-term releases. For tactile sensing teams, the important updates are not marketing features. The practical updates are around middleware support, rosbag2 workflows, action data recording, and ros2_control sensor broadcasters.
Technical takeaways
- ROS 2 Kilted adds current middleware support, including Zenoh as a Tier 1 RMW implementation.
- rosbag2 improvements help record, replay, inspect, and compare sensor sessions.
- ros2_control Kilted release notes include filter chains for force/torque sensor readings.
- Force/torque data can be transformed to target frames, which matters for robot hands and grippers.
Integration notes
A tactile skin integration should define message formats, timestamps, coordinate frames, QoS settings, replay strategy, and calibration metadata. Without these, good hardware data becomes hard to debug.