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 Visual SLAM with Isaac Sim

Overview

This tutorial walks you through a graph to estimate 3D pose of the camera with Visual SLAM using images from Isaac Sim.

Tutorial Walkthrough

1. Complete the quickstart.

2. Launch the Docker container using the run_dev.sh script:

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

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

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

   

5. In a separate terminal, start isaac_ros_visual_slam using the launch files:

   ros2 launch isaac_ros_visual_slam isaac_ros_visual_slam_isaac_sim.launch.py
   

7. In a separate terminal, send the signal to move the robot about as follows:

   ros2 topic pub --once /cmd_vel geometry_msgs/msg/Twist "{linear: {x: 0.2, y: 0.0, z: 0.0}, angular: {x: 0.0, y: 0.0, z: 0.2}}""
   

7. In a separate terminal, spin up RViz with default configuration file to see the rich visualizations as the robot moves.

   rviz2 -d src/isaac_ros_visual_slam/isaac_ros_visual_slam/rviz/isaac_sim.cfg.rviz
   

   

8. To see the odometry messages, in a separate terminal echo the contents of the /visual_slam/tracking/odometry topic with the following command:

   ros2 topic echo /visual_slam/tracking/odometry
   

   

Saving and Using the Map

As soon as you start the visual SLAM node, it starts storing the landmarks and the pose graph. You can save them in a map and store the map onto a disk. Make a call to the SaveMap ROS 2 Action with the following command:

Note

/path/to/save/the/map must be a new empty directory every time you call this action because this action overwrites the existing contents.

ros2 action send_goal /visual_slam/save_map isaac_ros_visual_slam_interfaces/action/SaveMap "{map_url: /path/to/save/the/map}"

Try to load and localize in the previously saved map. Stop the visual_slam node launched for creating and saving the map, then relaunch it.

Use the following command to load the map from the disk and provide an approximate start location (prior):

ros2 action send_goal /visual_slam/load_map_and_localize isaac_ros_visual_slam_interfaces/action/LoadMapAndLocalize "{map_url: /path/to/save/the/map, localize_near_point: {x: x_val, y: y_val, z: z_val}}"

After the above step returns success, you have successfully loaded and localized your robot in the map. If it results in failure, there might be a possibility that the current landmarks from the approximate start location are not matching with stored landmarks and you need to provide another valid value.