Release Notes

Isaac ROS 3.2 December 10, 2024

Packages available as 3.2 Release tagged v3.2 on GitHub.

What’s New

Updates including:

  • support for JetPack 6.1 / Ubuntu 22.04 on CUDA 12.6 (only)

  • tested with Isaac Sim 4.2

  • Isaac Perceptor end-to-end workflow with vision-only mapping, localization, and obstacle perception for AMR navigation

  • Isaac Manipulator pick-and-place workflow with pose estimation, grasping, and trajectory generation

  • Isaac Manipulator workflows (pose-to-pose, object-following, and pick-and-place) available in Isaac Sim

  • PyNITROS: Python API for CUDA with NITROS support with PyTorch tensors and images

  • Nova Event Data Recorder for collecting data during live operation

  • Nova online sensor monitoring diagnostics and offline data validation

  • verified Isaac Perceptor with new multi-cam rigs including Orbbec

  • isaac_mapping_ros: added offline map creation

  • isaac_ros_pose_estimation: improved FoundationPose performance and accuracy with multiple refinement, particularly for symmetric objects

  • isaac_ros_nvblox: improved fine-grained ~1cm voxel resolution, bounded workspace support, and multi-cam for workcell applications, dynamic mode support for Nova Carter/Nova Developer Kit, improved people detection for RealSense

  • isaac_ros_visual_global_localization: added multi-cam visual global localization

  • isaac_ros_visual_slam: added multi-cam SLAM mode localization

Limitations

This release has the following known limitations, with workarounds available in the troubleshooting section:

  • Nova Calibration Tool is deprecated.

  • The Debian package for isaac_ros_pynitros can only be installed inside the Isaac ROS Docker container.

  • Significant frame drops during data recording may occur in dark or occluded scenes due to excessive image noise exacerbating compression compute load.

  • Isaac Perceptor during startup may hang due to camera drop frames. Restart the launch file to recover.

Isaac ROS 3.1 September 26, 2024

Packages available as 3.1 Release tagged v3.1 on GitHub.

What’s New

Updates including:

  • restored ZED support

  • tested with Isaac Sim 4.1

Limitations

This release has the following known limitations, with workarounds available in the troubleshooting section:

  • Isaac Sim 4.2 not yet supported

  • Isaac Perceptor workflows only support Isaac Sim 4.0

Isaac ROS 3.0.1 June 14, 2024

Packages available as 3.0.1 Release tagged v3.0.1 on GitHub.

What’s New

Updates including:

  • tested with Isaac Sim 4.0

  • Isaac Sim NITROS Bridge support

  • Improved Isaac Perceptor low-lying obstacle detection through new camera/ground calibration for Nova Developer Kit

Limitations

This release has the following known limitations, with workarounds available in the troubleshooting section:

  • Latest RealSense firmware (5.16.0.1) and librealsense (2.55.1) introduced breaking changes. Reverted to building supported versions from source.

Isaac ROS 3.0.0 May 30, 2024

Packages available as 3.0.0 Release tagged v3.0.0 on GitHub.

What’s New

Updates including:

  • support for JetPack 6.0 / Ubuntu 22.04 on CUDA 12.2 (only)

  • tested with Isaac Sim 2023.1.1

  • Introducing Isaac Manipulator reference workflows for perception-driven manipulation

  • Introducing Isaac Perceptor reference workflows for visual odometry and obstacle perception

  • Improved documentation with tabbed quickstarts for source/binary and image providers

  • isaac_ros_benchmark added multi-cam benchmarks

  • isaac_ros_common improvements to run_dev.sh, added Docker deployment scripts

  • isaac_ros_cumotion new cuMotion package and MoveIt! plugin

  • isaac_ros_dnn_inference decomposed DNN image encoder nodes

  • isaac_ros_ess updated for ESS 4.0 improved for workcell manipulation use cases

  • isaac_ros_foundationpose added NITROS FoundationPose decoder

  • isaac_ros_image_proc added crop/resize nodes

  • isaac_ros_jetson_stats added jtop package

  • isaac_ros_mission_client new Nav2 docking support

  • isaac_ros_nitros added message_filter support for CUDA with NITROS

  • isaac_ros_nova new data recorder/replayer, rosbag validation tools

  • isaac_ros_nitros_bridge added support for Jetson

  • isaac_ros_nvblox new multi-cam scene reconstruction, added NITROS support, Foxglove viz plugin

  • isaac_ros_rtdetr added NITROS RT-DETR support for SyntheticaDETR models

  • isaac_ros_segformer added NITROS Segformer decoder

  • isaac_ros_segment_anything added NITROS Segment Anything (SAM) decoder

  • isaac_ros_visual_slam new multi-cam visual odometry, added NITROS support

Limitations

This release has the following known limitations, with workarounds available in the troubleshooting section:

  • Known stability issues and frame drops under high CPU load in multi-cam configurations

  • Known disconnect issues with Nova Carter WiFi + Bluetooth when switching access points during teleoperation

  • Known high latency issue of Isaac ROS FoundationPose pipeline with Hawk cameras

  • Removed support for JetPack 5.1.2, Ubuntu 20.04, and Jetson Xavier

  • Removed support for Stereolabs ZED cameras until ZED SDK support for JP6 is available

  • ROS 1 Noetic not supported on Ubuntu 22.04 for use with Isaac ROS NITROS Bridge

  • Known issue with setting use_intra_process_comms explicitly to True in ROS graphs with NITROS nodes. See workaround here.

Feature Requests & Issues Addressed

This release contains new features and fixes to address user feedback, including:

Isaac ROS 2.1.0 November 16, 2023

Packages available as 2.1.0 Release tagged v2.1.0 on GitHub.

What’s New

Updates including:

  • Streamlined developer experience with prebuilt Debian packages for Isaac ROS on x86 and Jetson platforms

  • ros2_benchmark added live mode benchmarking capability

  • isaac_ros_managed_nitros_examples added CV-CUDA DNN Image Encoder example

  • isaac_ros_unet improved segmentation accuracy by converting to BGR colorspace

Limitations

This release has the following known limitations, with workarounds available in the troubleshooting section:

  • CV-CUDA DNN Image Encoder example is limited to x86 platforms with discrete GPU

  • Isaac ROS Nvblox prebuilt Debian packages not yet available

Feature Requests & Issues Addressed

This release contains new features and fixes to address user feedback, including:

  • gxf #2: Added additional files

Isaac ROS 2.0.0 October 18, 2023

Packages available as 2.0.0 Release tagged v2.0.0 on GitHub.

What’s New

Updates including:

  • support for JetPack 5.1.2

  • support for Isaac Sim 2023.1.0

  • support for Nova Carter

  • support for Stereolabs ZED cameras

  • isaac_ros_apriltag improved throughput performance, exposed new tuning parameters

  • isaac_ros_centerpose adding NITROS CenterPose decoder

  • isaac_ros_ess updated for ESS 3.0 with confidence thresholding in multiple resolutions

  • isaac_ros_h264_decoder added support on aarch64

  • isaac_ros_h264_encoder added support on x86_64

  • isaac_ros_managed_nitros introducing CUDA with NITROS

  • isaac_ros_mission_client added mission cancellation and improved stability

  • isaac_ros_nitros_bridge introducing support for ROS 1 Noetic

  • isaac_ros_nova new support packages for Nova sensor suite

  • isaac_ros_nvblox new general dynamics detection, improved stability and performance

  • isaac_ros_stereo_image_proc added confidence thresholding for SGM

  • isaac_ros_yolov8 adding NITROS YOLOv8 decoder

  • isaac_ros_visual_slam improved stability

  • Improved developer experience with unified documentation site

  • Streamlined development workflow with ROS 2 Humble Debian packages for JetPack 5

  • Renamed Isaac ROS DNN Stereo Disparity -> Isaac ROS DNN Stereo Depth

  • Renamed Isaac ROS Proximity Segmentation -> Isaac ROS Depth Segmentation

  • Deleted Isaac ROS IMU, moved isaac_ros_imu_bmi088 to Isaac ROS Nova

Limitations

This release has the following known limitations, with workarounds available in the troubleshooting section:

  • Isaac ROS NITROS Bridge is limited to x86 platforms with discrete GPU

  • People in Isaac 2023.1.0 may not animate in Isaac ROS Nvblox examples

  • isaac_ros_triton can under certain conditions report errors of the form Incomplete inference; response appeared out of order.

  • Inconsistencies and failures on multi-GPU systems

  • Instability when running >2 stereo cameras through Isaac ROS Argus Camera

Feature Requests & Issues Addressed

This release contains new features and fixes to address user feedback, including:

Isaac ROS 0.31.0 DP (developer preview) May 25, 2023

Packages available as DP 3.1 Release tagged v0.31.0-dp on GitHub.

What’s New

Updates including:

  • isaac_ros_visual_slam updated with cuVSLAM 11 for improved performance, on-robot validation guide, and better HAWK support

  • optimizations for CPU overhead for all NITROS packages

  • isaac_ros_stereo_image_proc stereo rectification improved

  • new package isaac_ros_imu_bmi088 for interfacing with Bosch BMI088 IMU

Isaac ROS 0.30.0 DP (developer preview) April 5, 2023

Packages available as DP 3 Release tagged v0.30.0-dp on GitHub.

What’s New

Updates including:

  • support for JetPack 5.1.1

  • support for Jetson Orin NX, and Jetson Orin Nano 8GB

  • support for RTX 4K series (Lovelace GPU) with CUDA 11.8 on x86_64

  • new package isaac_ros_map_localization using LIDAR to automatically find the pose of the robot for Nav2

  • isaac_ros_vslam improvements for better covariance estimation and planar constraints for mobile robots

  • isaac_ros_nvblox improvements for DNN-based person detection and removal from 3D scene reconstruction

  • isaac_ros_h264_encoder improvement adding H.264 P-frame encode for higher performance and smaller rosbags

  • isaac_ros_h264_decoder improvement adding H.264 decompression on Jetson (aarch64)

  • isaac_ros_dnn_stereo_depth improvement of ESS DNN trained with real data and SDG (synthetic data generation)

  • new package ros2_benchmark for performance measurement of graphs of nodes in open source

  • new package isaac_ros_benchmark building upon ros2_benchmark to provide configurations to benchmark Isaac ROS graphs of nodes

  • open source release for multiple NITROS-enabled NVIDIA-accelerated packages

Limitations

This release has the following known limitations, with workarounds available in the troubleshooting section:

  • isaac_ros_triton can under certain conditions report errors of the form Incomplete inference; response appeared out of order.

  • isaac_ros_h264_encoder can become unresponsive when starting a stream after stopping because of a known synchronization bug.

Feature Requests & Issues Addressed

This release contains new features and fixes to address user feedback, including:

Isaac ROS 0.20.0 DP (developer preview) October 19, 2022

Packages available as DP 2 Release tagged v0.20.0-dp.

What’s New

Updates including:

  • support for Jetson Orin Nano 8GB

  • Apache-2.0 licensing for Isaac ROS repositories

  • isaac_ros_compression NVIDIA-accelerated H.264 encoding/decoding

  • isaac_ros_depth_segmentation freespace segmentation based on Bi3D, added Isaac Sim tutorials, added RealSense tutorial

  • isaac_ros_mission_client VDA5050-compatible Nav2 mission controller, added Isaac Sim tutorial

  • isaac_ros_dnn_stereo_depth added Isaac Sim tutorial, added RealSense tutorial

  • isaac_ros_image_pipeline added Isaac Sim tutorial, added RealSense tutorial

Limitations

This release has the following known limitations, with workarounds available in the troubleshooting section:

  • isaac_ros_h264_encoder can become unresponsive when starting a stream after stopping because of a known synchronization bug.

Isaac ROS 0.11.0 DP (developer preview) September 1, 2022

Packages available as DP 1.1 Release tagged v0.11.0-dp.

What’s New

Updates including:

  • support for JetPack 5.0.2

  • support for Isaac Sim 2022.1.1

  • isaac_ros_image_pipeline added image flip node

  • isaac_ros_nvblox added support for 3D LIDAR input and serialization of maps to file, improved performance

  • isaac_ros_object_detection accelerated DetectNet inference with NITROS, added Isaac Sim tutorial, improved performance

  • isaac_ros_pose_estimation accelerated DOPE inference with NITROS

  • isaac_ros_depth_segmentation updated Bi3D model, added dynamic disparity level support

  • isaac_ros_visual_slam updated launch files for RealSense package changes, removed stale dependency on isaac_ros_image_proc

Limitations

This release has the following known limitations, with workarounds available in the troubleshooting section:

  • Intel RealSense drivers do not support Humble out-of-the-box (workaround here)

Feature Requests and Issues Addressed

This release contains new features and fixes to address feedback, including:

Isaac ROS 0.10.1 DP (Developer Preview) July 12, 2022

Packages available as DP Release tagged v0.10.1-dp.

What’s New

Minor bug fixes and updates including:

  • isaac_ros_apriltag updated launch file ‘max_tags’ parameter to default 64

  • isaac_ros_argus_camera tuned queue sizes

  • isaac_ros_common add missing dependency on isaac_ros_apriltag_interfaces

  • isaac_ros_dnn_stereo_depth tuned QoS and queue sizes

  • isaac_ros_image_pipeline improved frame synchronization

  • isaac_ros_nvblox fixed integration with Nav2 costmaps on Humble, updated topic names for test rosbag, fixed rosdeps

  • isaac_ros_visual_slam updated launch files for RealSense package changes, removed stale dependency on isaac_ros_image_proc

Isaac ROS 0.10.0 DP (Developer Preview) June 30, 2022

Packages available as DP Release tagged v0.10.0-dp.

What’s New

ROS 2 Humble release of Isaac ROS with performance boost and new stereo perception functions including:

  • packages for ROS 2 Humble (Foxy deprecated) on JetPack 5.0.1 DP

  • support for Jetson Orin

  • support for Isaac Sim 2022.1 (Isaac SIM 2021.2 is deprecated)

  • isaac_ros_nitros implementing type adaptation and type negotiation features new to Humble boosting performance

  • isaac_ros_depth_segmentation for stereo vision detection of obstacles during navigation

  • isaac_ros_dnn_stereo_depth for stereo vision AI prediction of depth

Limitations

There are known limitations with this release, that might have additional details for workarounds in the troubleshooting section:

  • Isaac SIM 2022.1 released in June 2022 will add support for Humble in September. Incompatibilities exist when performing SIL (software in the loop) simulation with Isaac ROS.

  • RealSense drivers as-is do not support Humble, but can be modified to work.

  • isaac_ros_nvblox is untested with Nav2 on Humble.

  • Removed CenterPose support on Jetson.

  • isaac_ros_ess throws an error if using rosbag as input, and input topics are published after the node is started.

Isaac ROS 0.9.3 EA3 (Early Access) March 23, 2022

Packages available as EA3 Release tagged v0.9.3-ea3.

What’s New

GTC 2022 release of Isaac ROS with new packages for vision based autonomous navigation including:

  • packages for ROS 2 Foxy on JetPack 4.6.1

  • isaac_ros_visual_slam upgraded from SVIO as visual odometry source for Nav2 with save and load of feature maps

  • isaac_ros_nvblox for vision based temporary 3D obstacle map construction in real-time

  • isaac_ros_object_detection to detect and classify obstacles using DNN detection networks

Isaac ROS 0.9.1 EA2.1 (Early Access) Nov 22, 2021

Packages available as EA2 Release tagged v0.9.1-ea2.

What’s New

Incremental update with fixes and new packages from previous ROSCon 2021 release, including:

  • packages for ROS 2 Foxy on JetPack 4.6

  • support for Isaac Sim 2021.3

  • isaac_ros_pose_estimation update adding CenterPose DNN for detection of pose

  • Isaac SIM <-> Isaac ROS tutorials with Jetson hardware in the loop

  • new software license with commercial use grant

Isaac ROS EA2 (Early Access) Oct 20, 2021

What’s New

ROSCon 2021 release of Isaac ROS providing NVIDIA acceleration for autonomous robots with new features including:

  • packages for ROS 2 Foxy on JetPack 4.6

  • isaac_ros_visual_odometry providing stereo visual inertial odometry

  • isaac_ros_argus_camera for NVIDIA-accelerated ISP of CSI and GMSL cameras

  • isaac_ros_image_segmentation for DNN based image segmentation including people detection pre-trained model

  • isaac_ros_pose_estimation for detection of pose using DOPE DNN

  • isaac_ros_dnn_inference for TensorRT and Triton inferencing server for DNN processing

Isaac ROS EA1 (Early Access) Aug 11, 2021

What’s New

This is the first release of Isaac ROS providing NVIDIA acceleration for autonomous robots with new features including:

  • packages for ROS 2 Foxy on JetPack 4.5

  • isaac_apriltag providing NVIDIA acceleration replacement for apriltag

  • isaac_image_proc providing NVIDIA acceleration replacement for image_proc

  • isaac_stereo_image_proc providing NVIDIA acceleration replacement for image_proc