Tutorial: Stereo Camera Configurations for Isaac Perceptor

Isaac Perceptor supports various stereo camera configurations. They configure how the different camera images are processed in the Isaac Perceptor algorithms.

Configuration Description

The following table lists all stereo camera configurations and specifies the corresponding downstream pipeline:

Configuration Name

ESS + Nvblox

cuVSLAM

People

front_configuration

Front: Full at 30 Hz

Front

front_people_configuration

Front: Full at 30 Hz

Front

Front

front_left_right_configuration

Front: Full at 30 Hz

Left/Right: Light at 15 Hz

Front/Left/Right

Additional information:

  • Front/Left/Right denote the stereo cameras mounted on either Nova Orin Developer Kit or Nova Carter.

  • The terms Full and Light correspond to different versions of the ESS DNN model.

  • The People column refers to the people reconstruction mode of nvblox.

Note

When enabling wheel odometry with the enable_wheel_odometry on Nova Carter, visual SLAM is automatically disabled on all cameras.

Selecting a Configuration for Isaac Perceptor

When running Isaac Perceptor, the stereo camera configuration can be specified using the stereo_camera_configuration argument:

ros2 launch <"platform name">_bringup perceptor.launch.py \
    stereo_camera_configuration:=<"configuration name">

where “platform name” is either nova_developer_kit or nova_carter, depending on the platform you are running Isaac Perceptor on:

To access all available sensor configurations, use the --show-args argument, for example:

ros2 launch <"platform name">_bringup perceptor.launch.py --show-args

The following table lists the stereo camera configuration compatibility for the Isaac Perceptor tutorials on Nova Carter and Nova Orin Developer Kit platforms:

Configuration Name

Nova Carter

Nova Orin Developer Kit

front_configuration

front_people_configuration

front_left_right_configuration

Selecting a Configuration for Autonomous Navigation

The stereo_camera_configuration argument can be used similarly in the navigation tutorials:

ros2 launch <"platform name">_bringup navigation.launch.py \
    stereo_camera_configuration:=<"configuration name">

Tutorials for autonomous navigation are available for Nova Carter, Nova Orin Developer Kit and Isaac Sim:

The following table lists the stereo camera configuration compatibility for the Autonomous Navigation tutorials with Nova Carter, Nova Orin Developer Kit and Isaac Sim:

Configuration Name

Nova Carter

Nova Orin Developer Kit

Isaac Sim

front_configuration

front_people_configuration

front_left_right_configuration

no_camera (see note below)

Note

If you want to run Autonomous Navigation with lidar perception only, you can disable Isaac Perceptor by setting the configuration to no_camera. This will also require that you set enable_wheel_odometry:=True. Ensure you have access to lidar and wheel odometry while running with no_camera, and topic names are configured correctly.