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.

Compute Setup

x86 Platforms

1. Prepare a NVIDIA-powered platform with the following minimum specs:

   • Ubuntu 20.04+

     • Experimental: WSL2 on Windows 11

   • 16 GB general RAM

   • Discrete NVIDIA GPU with the following specs:

     • supports CUDA 11.8 with Volta or newer

     • minimum 8GB of VRAM and recommended 12GB+

2. Install Docker from official instructions (here)

3. Install the latest NVIDIA GPU Driver from official instructions (here)

Jetson Platforms

1. Install Jetpack including the nvidia-container package.

2. After boot, confirm that you have installed Jetpack 5.1.2 by running the following command. Confirm that the output has the terms R35 (release), REVISION: 4.1.

   cat /etc/nv_tegra_release
   

3. Run the following command to set the GPU and CPU clock to max. See Maximizing Jetson Performance for more details.

   sudo /usr/bin/jetson_clocks
   

4. Run the following command to set the to power to MAX settings. See Power Mode Controls for more details.

   sudo /usr/sbin/nvpmodel -m 0
   

5. Add your user to the docker group.

   sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
   newgrp docker
   

6. Setup Docker.

   From the official Docker install instructions (here), install the docker-buildx-plugin.

   # Add Docker's official GPG key:
   sudo apt-get update
   sudo apt-get install ca-certificates curl gnupg
   sudo install -m 0755 -d /etc/apt/keyrings
   curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg
   sudo chmod a+r /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg
   
   # Add the repository to Apt sources:
   echo \
   "deb [arch="$(dpkg --print-architecture)" signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu \
   "$(. /etc/os-release && echo "$VERSION_CODENAME")" stable" | \
   sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null
   sudo apt-get update
   
   sudo apt install docker-buildx-plugin
   

Consider adding more storage to your Jetson for a better experience: Developer Environment Setup for Jetson