Attention

As of June 30, 2025, the Isaac ROS Buildfarm for Isaac ROS 2.1 on Ubuntu 20.04 Focal is no longer supported.

Due to an isolated infrastructure event, all ROS 2 Humble Debian packages that were previously built for Ubuntu 20.04 are no longer available in the Isaac Apt Repository. All artifacts for Isaac ROS 3.0 and later are built and maintained with a more robust pipeline.

Users are encouraged to migrate to the latest version of Isaac ROS. The source code for Isaac ROS 2.1 continues to be available on the release-2.1 branches of the Isaac ROS GitHub repositories.

The original documentation for Isaac ROS 2.1 is preserved below.

Tutorial for DNN Stereo Depth Estimation with Isaac Sim

https://media.githubusercontent.com/media/NVIDIA-ISAAC-ROS/.github/main/resources/isaac_ros_docs/concepts/stereo_depth/ess/Rviz.png/

Overview

This tutorial walks you through a graph to estimate depth with stereo images from Isaac Sim.

Tutorial Walkthrough

  1. Complete steps 1-7 listed in the quickstart.

  2. Install and launch Isaac Sim following the steps in the Isaac ROS Isaac Sim Setup Guide.

  3. Press Play to start publishing data from the Isaac Sim.

    https://media.githubusercontent.com/media/NVIDIA-ISAAC-ROS/.github/main/resources/isaac_ros_docs/getting_started/isaac_sim_sample_scene.png/

  4. Open a second terminal and attach to the container:

    cd ${ISAAC_ROS_WS}/src/isaac_ros_common && \
./scripts/run_dev.sh

  5. In the second terminal, start the isaac_ros_ess node using the launch files:

    ros2 launch isaac_ros_ess isaac_ros_ess_isaac_sim.launch.py engine_file_path:=/workspaces/isaac_ros-dev/src/isaac_ros_dnn_stereo_depth/resources/ess.engine

  6. Optionally, you can run the visualizer script to visualize the disparity image.

    ros2 run isaac_ros_ess isaac_ros_ess_visualizer.py
    https://media.githubusercontent.com/media/NVIDIA-ISAAC-ROS/.github/main/resources/isaac_ros_docs/concepts/stereo_depth/ess/Visualizer_isaac_sim.png/