Isaac ROS July update, Humble with hardware accelerated node graphs

General
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Isaac ROS DP (developer preview) has been released with major updates and hardware acceleration for ROS2 Humble; this is a culmination of a 9 month joint effort with Open Robotics to optimize the platform for hardware acceleration of ROS2 nodes. Many thanks to those contributing to the effort.

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

  • ROS2 Humble (Foxy deprecated)

  • NITROS (NVIDIA Isaac Transport for ROS) package provides type adaptation (REP-2007) and type negotiation (REP-2009) for hardware acceleration in ROS2.

  • Stereo disparity using ESS trained DNN for stereo camera depth prediction.
    isaac_ros_dp_ess_opt

  • Proximity segmentation using BI3D trained DNN for stereo camera proximity field detection excluding freespace from predictions and optimized to run on DLA hardware.
    isaac_ros_bi3d_real_opt

  • Jetson Orin + Jetpack 5 + Isaac SIM 2022.1 (2021.2.1 deprecated)

  • bug fixes

Preview the Isaac stereo perception running in real environments and simulation.

Significant performance improvements come with this release benefiting from hardware acceleration additions to Humble.

Package Isaac ROS EA3
Foxy Jetson Xavier		 Isaac ROS DP
Humble Jetson Xavier		 Isaac ROS DP
Humble Jetson Orin
AprilTag (720p) 101fps 150fps (1.5x) 260fps (1.7x)
DOPE
(object pose DNN) (VGA) 		12.5fps 12.5fps (1x) 43fps (3.4x)
Image segmentation
people detector (544p) 		30fps 208fps (6.9x) 325fps (1.5x)
Proximity segmentation
BI3D (576p) (DLA) 		N/A 33fps 62fps (1.9x)
Stereo disparity
ESS DNN (1080p) 		N/A 24fps 51fps (2.2x)
Stereo disparity
SGM CV (540p) 		60fps 80fps (1.3x) 166fps (2x)

Isaac ROS DP (developer preview) update is available now on Isaac ROS GitHub with a full list of available ROS2 packages and 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 ROS2 packages. Please note that this release has been tested on the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin developer kit and Jetson AGX Xavier developer kit with JetPack 5.0.1 developer preview (Ubuntu 20.04).

An incremental update for Jetpack 5.0 GA will be released late summer and a major update released in Oct at ROSCon Kyoto.

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What is the general experience with Humble on Jetson? I’m hesitant to spend much time on a tier 3 ROS platform but I’m fully on Humble on other platforms (which run Ubuntu 22).

  • Mark West
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Thanks Nvidia Team for sharing the information.

Are those packages tested in both Isaac SIM and real environments? For real environment, which camera is used for benchmarking Isaac ROS DP Humble packages?

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We’ve fully switched to Humble for our development, and is been good.

Jetson Xavier is GA release quality on Jetpack 5.0.1 DP, and Jetson Orin will be GA quality later this summer.

Isaac ROS is a developer preview, and in development, where we continue to improve the quality, performance, and test on our in-house robots in active use.

Yes. Packages are tested in simulation and on reference robots.

BI3D and ESS are in their first release, and trained only on synthetically generated data. They will improve as real data is added to the training set in the next release.

We test against the reference camera’s listed in the Argus camera package, and with RealSense D435i and D455 which do not support Humble; there is a workaround for Realsense Humble support posted.

Thanks

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The Isaac ROS DP release has been updated with fixes + improvements and is available under git tag: v0.10.1-dp. For more information check the release notes which includes changes to enable nvblox with Nav2 on Humble.

In addition to the release performance summary, we are sharing measurements that highlight the performance improvements from hardware acceleration in Humble; ROS nodes running on the CPU in Jetson are compared to the hardware accelerated equivalent node from Isaac.

Package reference CPU
Jetson Xavier		 Isaac
Jetson Xavier		 reference CPU
Jetson Orin		 Isaac
Jetson Orin
AprilTag node
(720p) 		20fps 150fps(7.5x) 32fps 260fps (8.1x)
Stereo disparity node
(540p) 		55fps 80fps(1.4x) 74fps 166fps (2.2x)
Rectify node
(1080p) 		142fps 484fps(3.4x) 231fps 903fps (3.9x)

High frame rates far greater than camera line rate provides overhead to run multiple concurrent perception functions needed for vision to be an input to planning for higher levels of autonomy in more complex operating dynamic environments.

Leverage the capability hardware acceleration can unlock for autonomous navigation, and we will share the next major update for ROSCon in Oct.

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