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.

Isaac ROS RealSense Setup

Camera Compatibility

RealSense Model	Supported?
D455	✓
D435i	✓
D415	✗

Note

For best results, you must update the camera’s firmware.

Setup Instructions

Note

This tutorial assumes that you have completed following the instructions Developer Environment Setup.

1. Clone the librealsense repository and setup udev rules. Remove any connected RealSense cameras when prompted:

cd /tmp && \
git clone https://github.com/IntelRealSense/librealsense && \
cd librealsense && \
./scripts/setup_udev_rules.sh

2. Clone the isaac_ros_common and the 4.51.1 release of the realsense-ros repository:

Note

${ISAAC_ROS_WS} is defined to point to /ssd/workspaces/isaac_ros-dev/ or ~/workspaces/isaac_ros-dev/.

cd ${ISAAC_ROS_WS}/src
git clone https://github.com/NVIDIA-ISAAC-ROS/isaac_ros_common.git
git clone https://github.com/IntelRealSense/realsense-ros.git -b 4.51.1

3. Plug in your RealSense camera before launching the Docker container in the next step.

4. Configure the container created by isaac_ros_common/scripts/run_dev.sh to include librealsense. Create the .isaac_ros_common-config file in the isaac_ros_common/scripts directory:

cd ${ISAAC_ROS_WS}/src/isaac_ros_common/scripts && \
touch .isaac_ros_common-config && \
echo CONFIG_IMAGE_KEY=ros2_humble.realsense > .isaac_ros_common-config

5. Launch the Docker container:

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

This rebuilds the container image using Dockerfile.realsense in one of its layered stage. Rebuilding can take several minutes.

6. After the container image is rebuilt and you are inside the container, you can run realsense-viewer to verify that the RealSense camera is connected.

realsense-viewer

If you turn on the “Stereo Module” in the GUI, you should see something like the following: