Isaac ROS Buildfarm

NVIDIA Jetson platforms run on JetPack OS which is based on Ubuntu Linux. JetPack 5.x is built on top of Ubuntu 20.04 Focal, meaning that Debian packages for ROS 2 Humble built by the ROS 2 Buildfarm for Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy are unsupported.

Since the official ROS 2 Buildfarm only builds for Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy, the Isaac ROS Buildfarm is setup to build ROS 2 packages from source for Ubuntu 20.04 Focal.

Setup

The Isaac ROS Buildfarm is a fork of the official Buildfarm with several modifications to build nearly all ROS 2 packages for Ubuntu 20.04 Focal. NVIDIA’s semi-global CDN distributes these community-contributed packages and soon prebuilt Isaac ROS Debian packages.

To setup the CDN as an apt source, perform the following steps:

Set Locale

locale  # check for UTF-8

sudo apt update && sudo apt install locales
sudo locale-gen en_US en_US.UTF-8
sudo update-locale LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

locale  # verify settings

Install Dependencies

sudo apt update && sudo apt install gnupg wget
sudo apt install software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository universe

Setup Source

First, register the GPG key with apt. Two options are listed below, one for .com (US CDN) and one for .cn (China CDN) - choose whichever you prefer.

wget -qO - https://isaac.download.nvidia.com/isaac-ros/repos.key | sudo apt-key add -

wget -qO - https://isaac.download.nvidia.cn/isaac-ros/repos.key | sudo apt-key add -

Now add the repository to your apt sources.

echo 'deb https://isaac.download.nvidia.com/isaac-ros/ubuntu/main focal main' | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list

echo 'deb https://isaac.download.nvidia.cn/isaac-ros/ubuntu/main focal main' | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list

Next, for all non-Buildfarm ROS 2 packages, ensure you have the ROS 2 apt repository sourced.

sudo apt update && sudo apt install curl -y \
&& sudo curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ros/rosdistro/master/ros.key -o /usr/share/keyrings/ros-archive-keyring.gpg

echo "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/ros-archive-keyring.gpg] http://packages.ros.org/ros2/ubuntu focal main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros2.list > /dev/null

This should allow for as-normal installation of almost all ROS 2 packages. We guarantee support for any ROS 2 packages on which Isaac ROS is dependent.

Install ROS 2 Packages

sudo apt update

Per ROS 2 documentation:

Desktop Install (Recommended): ROS, RViz, demos, tutorials.

sudo apt install ros-humble-desktop

and/or

sudo apt install ros-humble-desktop-full

ROS-Base Install (Bare Bones): Communication libraries, message packages, command line tools. No GUI tools.

sudo apt install ros-humble-ros-base

Development tools: Compilers and other tools to build ROS packages

sudo apt install ros-dev-tools