### Polymath Perspectives from ROSCON2025 in Singapore

November 13, 2025

Troy Gibb and Emerson Knapp, two of Polymath’s Staff Engineers, attended ROSCon 2025 in Singapore a few weeks ago.  
Here are their takeaways & hot takes from the conference - as jotted down by the gentlemen themselves!

## Themes & Takeaways

- **Build and Infrastructure**  
  - Was on full display as one of the pieces a) talked about in official presentations and b) had a lot of discussions (including a “Birds of a Feather” group discussion session coordinated by Emerson)  
  - Hottest items:  
    - **nix**  
      - Troy’s hot take: So many good chats on this one! Although we didn’t run into many folks using NixOS in their prod fleets.  
      - Might be worth reaching out to Yuyuan Yuan at ZettaScale, who was an avid evangelist  
      - Emerson notes:  
        - [nix-ros-overlay](https://github.com/lopsided98/nix-ros-overlay) \- uses [superflore](https://github.com/ros-infrastructure/superflore) to generate Nix definitions for ros distros  
        - [ros2nix](https://github.com/wentasah/ros2nix/) \- generate Nix definitions from your ROS package.xml  
        - [nix-ros-base](https://github.com/clearpathrobotics/nix-ros-base) \- likely very outdated  
    - **pixi**  
      - Pixi is being presented as one of the major package managers for the ros ecosystem going forward.  
      - It is now the default package manager for the windows build of ros2, and if we had to guess, will start eating its way into linux distros at some point soon. 
      - Troy’s hot take: Pixi on the whole seems like a great way to isolate runtimes without containers and has some lightweight conventions on top of standard ros (pixi.toml), however for full OS configuration, I’m still personally more of a fan of NixOS.  
      - Built on Conda  
      - ROS integration is via [robostack](https://robostack.github.io/GettingStarted.html)  
    - **balena**  
      - Troy had a great conversation with Guillaume Doisy, VP at Dexory, who waxed eloquent about belana usage on their fleet of 100+ robots. Incremental upgrades was a feature he called out (even though it’s container based). Otherwise didn’t hear much about it at the conference.  
      - [balena documentation](https://docs.balena.io/learn/deploy/delta/)  
    - **mender**  
      - Emerson: I’ve been interested in this for a long time. Not mutually exclusive with any of the package management stuff, provides an A/B rootfs delta update mechanism that might replace/simplify use of CM tools like Ansible/Chef.  
      - Someone said they were using it just for the fleet management portion right now, which makes me think that the feature doesn’t 100% suck, worth looking at more.

- **Testing**  
  - RTest ([RTest GitHub](https://github.com/Beam-and-Spyrosoft/rtest)) is a unit test stub for running deterministic ros2 unit tests in C++. It works by mocking out the underlying pub/sub libraries in ros2  
    - Troy’s hot take: worth experimenting with. The folks at Spyrosoft developed this with a client, so it is battle tested.  
  - **replay_testing**  
    - Completely floored the entire conference. People loved it so much they walked out early.  
    - Had a couple of people come up to chat more about it, and stated their intent to use it.

- **Simulation**  
  - Some folks from Nvidia, Gazebo and [Robotec.ai](http://robotec.ai/) presented a new simulation standard: [simulation interfaces](https://github.com/ros-simulation/simulation_interfaces)  
    - This standard is meant to reduce friction between using different simulators— currently they target Isaac sim, Gazebo and O3DE.  
    - Troy’s Hot Take: Definitely worth investigating this framework more! If we have a common layer between these frameworks, the migration cost will be minimal.  
  - **“Evaluation of ROS 2 Simulators 2025”**  
    - The speaker here presented some benchmarks on the common simulators. TL;DR: Isaac Sim performed extremely poorly in all benchmarks.  
  - Gazebo  
    - Didn’t see anything worth writing home about

- **Data**  
  - [Roboto.ai](https://docs.roboto.ai) is building really cool tooling to run analyses on robotics datasets (e.g. bunch o bags).

- **Tools**  
  - [Cloudini](https://github.com/facontidavide/cloudini) seems like a good package to trial run. Promises up to 50% compression of point clouds, and has an extension in Foxglove for its custom data type  
    - Emerson’s Hot Take: The core algorithm that Davide’s research led to is actually really simple! (that’s great) But, I discussed this with him and he fully indexed on covering the “general pointcloud” use case.  
  - [ros2_fmt_logger](https://github.com/nobleo/ros2_fmt_logger) is a promising take at a more ergonomic logging API for ROS 2  
  - [yazi](https://github.com/sxyazi/yazi) looks like really nice terminal-based filesystem explorer  
  - [viser](https://github.com/nerfstudio-project/viser) is a visualizer someone recommended  
  - [Roboflow](https://roboflow.com/)  
    - @Troy Gibb got a verbal promise to get a free trial of this tool!

- **RMW - Zenoh**  
  - TBD - Troy missed all these talks for the testing track!  
  - It’s looking really promising, performance seems great and that’s all we really care about.

## Our Favorite Talks
- **Day 1**  
  - Hosted BoF session, didn’t do much else other than networking  
- **Day 2**  
  - ROS Project Update  
  - On Use of Nav2 Route Server  
    - Highlighted video of Polymath doing tomato harvesting in production!  
  - Replay Testing  
  - Rtest - Reliable ROS 2 Unit Tests Framework  
    - seems promising, we have a lot of flaky tests ourselves, the core patterns encourage it  
  - Zenoh Strikes Back
- **Day 3**  
  - **Infrastructure Project Update**  
    - The ROS infrastructure is the unsung hero of the whole project.  
  - **Our Ten Most Common ROS Questions Answered**  
    - Super informative high level talk for anybody who uses ROS 2  
  - **Solving ROS Package Management With Pixi and Robostack**  
  - **Escape Velocity: Smarter, Cleaner ROS 2 Launch Patterns**
  - **Evaluation of ROS 2 Simulators 2025**  
    - Spoiler: Isaac did the worst by far  
  - **Introducing the New ROS Simulation Standard**  
    - Promising but early stage, maybe not much we can actually use today  
  - **Introducing Rclrs: The ROS 2 Client Library for Rust**  
    - good to see the language landscape expand

## Polymath’s Sessions
### **Emerson - coordinated group discussion “Deployment & Launch Tooling”**

This was a 1 hour “Birds of a feather” (BoF) session, which is just an unstructured group discussion on a topic of shared interest. This one had 30-40 people, but turned into more of an impromptu panel with 5-6 most vocal participants, Emerson moderating, with others chiming in occasionally with questions or thoughts.

High level takeaway: We still have a long way to go building the bridges between DevOps and robotics as robotics matures into an industry.  
Topics that came up:
- Applications start on robot?
 - SystemD services running launchfiles or individual nodes
 - Containers & some form of composition, feeling disillusioned with containers for on-robot use
- What's the payload you deploy to your robot?
 - discussed incremental updates because payload sizes are really big and you feel this more when trying to scale
- Fleet management (overloaded term)  
 - consensus is there is no clear winner solution for robots still but many tools exist to solve parts of the problem.

### **Troy - “Replay Testing”**  
ROSCON2025 - "Replay Testing" - Troy Gibb - YouTube  
[Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adtnzhF7B10)

### **Emerson - Lightning Talk “Monobranch strategy for ROS package maintenance”**  
[SLIDES HERE](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/13sUJCI8zbZ78CgphJXy46bgtFr3wVj_zsoUXvHgQq2o/edit?usp=sharing)  
ROSCON2025 - "Lightning Monobranch" - Emerson Knapp - YouTube  
[Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ep4An4B7Qo)

### **Emerson - “Escape Velocity: How to write better launchfiles”**  
[SLIDES HERE](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1eKRxB8y3y0lEe-YeB6OUsu0nGAy6tnfVKjGfAzVUPak/edit?usp=sharing)  
ROSCON 2025 - "Escape Velocity" - Emerson Knapp - YouTube  
[Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgEUz4ElUfo)

## Photos!

Emerson with his fellow members of the ROS 2 Project Management Committee

How many badge ribbons can you reasonably collect?
  
Troy’s groundbreaking Testing Pyramid framework
  
Bouldering meetup after the first day of the conference
  
Troy and Emerson on a Jurassic adventure in the Cloud Forest dome at the Gardens by the Bay
  
Robots sighted in the wild

Written By  
##### Emerson Knapp  
Emerson is a Staff Engineer at Polymath Robotics.