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 Using a Zed Camera

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

Overview

This tutorial demonstrates how to perform stereo-camera-based reconstruction using a Zed camera and isaac_ros_ess.

Note

This tutorial requires a compatible ZED camera from the list of available cameras.

Tutorial Walkthrough

  1. Complete the Zed Setup Tutorial.

  2. Complete steps 1-2 and 4-6 as described in the ESS Quickstart Guide.

  3. Open a new terminal and launch the Docker container using the run_dev.sh script:

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

  4. Build and source the workspace:

    cd /workspaces/isaac_ros-dev && \
  colcon build --symlink-install && \
  source install/setup.bash

  5. Run the launch file, which launches the example and waits for 10 seconds:

    ros2 launch isaac_ros_ess isaac_ros_ess_zed.launch.py engine_file_path:=/workspaces/isaac_ros-dev/src/isaac_ros_dnn_stereo_depth/resources/ess.engine threshold:=0.8