Isaac ROS April update, open source + Orin Nano + Lovelace GPU’s

We are releasing Isaac ROS DP3 (developer preview) with major updates, enhancements, and bug fixes.

Isaac ROS update for ROS 2 Humble is available now at github.com/NVIDIA-ISAAC-ROS.

This release includes packages for AI perception, image processing, navigation and adds:

  • Occupancy grid localizer package using LIDAR to automatically find the pose of the robot for Nav2 in less a second on first start
  • updated VSLAM with better covariance estimation, and planar constraints for mobile robots
  • updated nvBlox using AI perception to remove people from 3D reconstruction
  • added P-frame compression to H.264 encoder for higher performance and smaller rosbags
  • H.264 decoder for decompressing images from rosbag locally on Jetson (aarch64)
  • source release of NITROS providing hardware acceleration with high performance, low latency graphs of nodes using type adaptation (REP-2007) and negotiation (REP-2009)
  • Isaac ROS benchmark built on the open source ros2_benchmark adding type adaptation and negotiation plug-ins to measure performance of graphs of nodes. See the ros2_benchmark announcement for more details.
  • open source release for multiple NITROS accelerated computing packages
  • recently released Ada RTX 40xx series GPU’s platform support
  • newly released Orin Nano and Orin NX platform support
  • WSL2 support for developing on Linux under Windows 11 (experimental)
  • bug fixes

occupancy_grid_localizer
RVIZ on the left, and Isaac Sim scene top view on the right. Initial global pose of the robot is computed in less than 1 second automatically using the occupancy grid localizer package, to start navigation. This can remove the need to manually provide the initial pose for Nav2.

This Isaac ROS update is part of our commitment to provide features and hardware acceleration for autonomous robots.

Clone the repositories you need into your ROS workspace to build from source with colcon alongside your other ROS 2 packages and leverage the pre-built ROS2 Humble & Nav2 container. Please note that this release has been tested on the NVIDIA Orin & Xavier platforms with JetPack 5.1.1 (Ubuntu 20.04).

An update for ROS 2 Iron will be in June, with a major update in Oct for Ubuntu 22.04 with Jetpack 6.0.

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Great work @ggrigor and team!

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