isaac ros 5 agentic open source robotics a ball joint coupling seated in a socket cup

NVIDIA Isaac ROS 5.0 Advances Agentic, Open Source Robotics Development

September 22, 2026
Artificial Intelligence
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NVIDIA released Isaac ROS 5.0 at ROSCon in Toronto on 22 September 2026, adding reusable agent skills in the open Agent Skills format, agent-ready documentation, support for ROS 2 Lyrical on Ubuntu 24.04, and a FoundationPose inference library it says is up to 5.5 times faster. The announcement omits that this is a breaking release: the NITROS packages have been removed and rebuilt on Lyrical’s rosidl::Buffer, and isaac_ros_visual_slam has been renamed. This article covers the new skills, the migration cost, the Ubuntu tier detail that reveals where Jetson sits, and the partners already shipping on it.

microduck hugging face pollen robotics 399 preorder a upright solid egg

Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics Open Pre-Orders for the $399 Microduck

August 27, 2026
Artificial Intelligence
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Hugging Face and its Pollen Robotics subsidiary opened pre-orders on 27 August 2026 for Microduck, a 25 cm bipedal robot duck priced at $399 before taxes and shipping, with first deliveries targeted before Christmas 2026. The machine carries 15 motors, a wide-angle camera, an 8×8 time-of-flight LiDAR array, two IMUs and an articulated beak that works as a gripper, on a Rockchip RK3566 with 1 GB of RAM and 32 GB of storage running its neural policy at 50 Hz. Seven behaviours ship on the device — walking, rolling on skates, grasping, kicking, standing up after a fall, sitting and a generated audio identity — and every one was trained in MuJoCo with proximal policy optimisation and transferred to hardware. The control stack and the full training pipeline are published under Apache 2.0, but the hardware is not open and Pollen Robotics says it has no plans to change that. This breakdown covers the pack pricing, the complete published specification, the Open Duck Mini project the design grew out of, how it compares with the Reachy Mini line, and the battery, payload and compute ceilings that decide who should actually buy one.