ROS 2 Kilted Kaiju Released
Happy World Turtle Day! Today, we are happy to announce the eleventh release of ROS 2: Kilted Kaiju! Kilted is a standard release, and will be supported until November, 2026. If you like the fantasic release art by our artist, Ryan Hungerford, our Kilted t-shirt and merchandise store is still open! All proceeds help support the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) and its projects.
Kilted Kaiju is primarily supported on Ubuntu 24.04 (amd64 and arm64 architectures) and Windows (amd64), but also supports, at a lower tier, RHEL 9 (amd64). For more information about system requirements, please see REP-2000. Check the installation instructions and tutorials on docs.ros.org, and give Kilted a spin!
We traditionally announce the name of the next ROS release once we’ve completed the current ROS release. We are excited to let you know that our May, 2026 release of ROS will be named Lyrical Luth.
New Features and Enhancements
Kilted Kaiju has many new features and improvements. The full details are available in the release notes and changelog. A few highlights are summarised below.
Tier 1 RMW Zenoh Support
ROS Kilted Kaiju is our first ROS release to support Eclipse Zenoh as a Tier 1 middleware! This means that it supports all of the listed Tier 1 operating systems for that particular ROS release, and we verify that support with a full battery of tests that run daily. Moreover, each Tier 1 middleware supports a full SROS2 security suite that includes access control, authentication, and encryption tools. We also require that all Tier 1 middlewares support all of the Tier 1 code quality requirements defined in REP-2004 and be included in the core ROS packages as listed in REP-2005. To learn more about the Eclipse Zenoh RMW please start by visiting its documentation.
Python Improvements
There are two big improvements to our Python client library (rclpy) available in Kilted Kaiju. The first one is extended Python type checking support, particularly for Python actions and Python generics. To ease Python type checking you may want to familiarize yourself with our ament_mypy tool and its relevant documentation.
Thanks to a community member porting the events executor from our C++ client library to Python, performance in Kilted Kaiju has also significantly improved. Some rudimentary benchmarks indicate that these speed ups could be as much as 10 times! You’ll need to opt-in to the new executor to see the performance improvement so be sure to check the documentation on changing your executor.
Action Introspection
Ever wonder about the status of your action server? Using the new action introspection command you can interrogate your action server from the command line using the new action echo command! This new command will show you the current state of your action. The best part? This action status information is also available within your ROS bag files!
New ROSBag Features
Kilted Kaiju has a laundry list of new ROSBag features that will greatly improve the lives of ROS users. A huge improvement for the ROSBag user experience is support for playing multiple bags. You can now replay multiple ROS bags with a single command line call.
Another bag playback usability improvement is a progress bar that lets you interactively execute, view and control your bag(s) playback.
In Kilted Kaiju, ROSBag now has its own first class action server that lets you trigger recording of a bag file by calling an action. We like to think of this feature as a system snapshot mode that lets you log a new behavior for easy debugging.
ROSBag also supports four new flags to help you better filter and order the replay of your data. These new flags include the following.
A message chronology filter that lets you choose between the time messages were sent or received.
A sorting utility that lets you sort topics, services and actions by name, topic type, and number of recorded messages.
Ever wonder why your bag file was so big? Our new size contribution filter lets you see the amount of data contributed by each topic.
Is log data spoiling your bag file? Trying to track down a bug? Our new log-level command lets you set the playback log level of your bag.
Better Windows Experience
Windows 11 is here, and we’re working towards a better ROS user experience for Windows 11 users in our planned 2026 “Lyrical Luth” release. A big step in the right direction is a new way to install ROS on Windows. Kilted Kaiju now uses Pixi (prefix.dev) and Conda as the default Windows installation mechanism. This approach has number of advantages:
easier dependency management,
a simplified installation process,
workspace-level installation (vs. global), and
a lower maintainer burden.
If you’re a ROS-on-Windows user, try it out now!
Miscellaneous Features
Kilted Kaiju now supports NV12 in common interfaces! What is NV12? It is a common and efficient way of encoding image data using the YCbCr approach. The format is commonly used by hardware devices like cameras and graphics cards, and many devices have built-in acceleration support for it. This can potentially improve image processing and transport speeds.
A Community Effort
ROS is truly a community effort, and this could not have been better exemplified by our public beta testing of Kilted Kaiju over the past few weeks. Nearly 550 test cases were put through the ringer with several improvements identified along the way. It really helped harden the Kilted Kaiju distribution for its first release. The release team would like to extend a heartfelt thank you to all testers. Additionally, ROS wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for all of our wonderful package maintainers. If you are a package maintainer who plans to have their code ready for release today, or soon, thank you for helping to make ROS useful to so many people in so many ways!
Onward to Lyrical Luth
After a well-earned break for the release team, we’re going to be moving full-speed into development for the next release of ROS. We look forward once again to working with the PMC Members, Committers, all other contributors, users, and the Open Source Robotics Alliance members on ROS Lyrical Luth.
If you or your organization would like to become more involved in ROS development, please reach out to us, check out the contributing guide, or just take a look at the repositories on GitHub, and start filing issues and fixing bugs! If you want to provide more long-term support to the people and infrastructure that make the ROS project possible, please consider joining the Open Source Robotics Alliance.
