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.

Release Notes

Isaac ROS 2.1.0 November 16, 2023

Packages available as 2.1.0 Release tagged v2.1.0 on GitHub.

What’s New

Updates including:

  • Streamlined developer experience with prebuilt Debian packages for Isaac ROS on x86 and Jetson platforms

  • ros2_benchmark added live mode benchmarking capability

  • isaac_ros_managed_nitros_examples added CV-CUDA DNN Image Encoder example

  • isaac_ros_unet improved segmentation accuracy by converting to BGR colorspace

Limitations

This release has the following known limitations, with workarounds available in the troubleshooting section:

  • CV-CUDA DNN Image Encoder example is limited to x86 platforms with discrete GPU

  • Isaac ROS Nvblox prebuilt Debian packages not yet available

Feature Requests & Issues Addressed

This release contains new features and fixes to address user feedback, including:

  • gxf #2: Added additional files

Isaac ROS 2.0.0 October 18, 2023

Packages available as 2.0.0 Release tagged v2.0.0 on GitHub.

What’s New

Updates including:

  • support for JetPack 5.1.2

  • support for Isaac Sim 2023.1.0

  • support for Nova Carter

  • support for Stereolabs ZED cameras

  • isaac_ros_apriltag improved throughput performance, exposed new tuning parameters

  • isaac_ros_centerpose adding NITROS CenterPose decoder

  • isaac_ros_ess updated for ESS 3.0 with confidence thresholding in multiple resolutions

  • isaac_ros_h264_decoder added support on aarch64

  • isaac_ros_h264_encoder added support on x86_64

  • isaac_ros_managed_nitros introducing CUDA with NITROS

  • isaac_ros_mission_client added mission cancellation and improved stability

  • isaac_ros_nitros_bridge introducing support for ROS 1 Noetic

  • isaac_ros_nova new support packages for Nova sensor suite

  • isaac_ros_nvblox new general dynamics detection, improved stability and performance

  • isaac_ros_stereo_image_proc added confidence thresholding for SGM

  • isaac_ros_yolov8 adding NITROS YOLOv8 decoder

  • isaac_ros_visual_slam improved stability

  • Improved developer experience with unified documentation site

  • Streamlined development workflow with ROS 2 Humble Debian packages for JetPack 5

  • Renamed Isaac ROS DNN Stereo Disparity -> Isaac ROS DNN Stereo Depth

  • Renamed Isaac ROS Proximity Segmentation -> Isaac ROS Depth Segmentation

  • Deleted Isaac ROS IMU, moved isaac_ros_imu_bmi088 to Isaac ROS Nova

Limitations

This release has the following known limitations, with workarounds available in the troubleshooting section:

  • Isaac ROS NITROS Bridge is limited to x86 platforms with discrete GPU

  • People in Isaac 2023.1.0 may not animate in Isaac ROS Nvblox examples

  • isaac_ros_triton can under certain conditions report errors of the form Incomplete inference; response appeared out of order.

  • Inconsistencies and failures on multi-GPU systems

  • Instability when running >2 stereo cameras through Isaac ROS Argus Camera

Feature Requests & Issues Addressed

This release contains new features and fixes to address user feedback, including:

Isaac ROS 0.31.0 DP (developer preview) May 25, 2023

Packages available as DP 3.1 Release tagged v0.31.0-dp on GitHub.

What’s New

Updates including:

  • isaac_ros_visual_slam updated with cuVSLAM 11 for improved performance, on-robot validation guide, and better HAWK support

  • optimizations for CPU overhead for all NITROS packages

  • isaac_ros_stereo_image_proc stereo rectification improved

  • new package isaac_ros_imu_bmi088 for interfacing with Bosch BMI088 IMU

Isaac ROS 0.30.0 DP (developer preview) April 5, 2023

Packages available as DP 3 Release tagged v0.30.0-dp on GitHub.

What’s New

Updates including:

  • support for JetPack 5.1.1

  • support for Jetson Orin NX, and Jetson Orin Nano 8GB

  • support for RTX 4K series (Lovelace GPU) with CUDA 11.8 on x86_64

  • new package isaac_ros_map_localization using LIDAR to automatically find the pose of the robot for Nav2

  • isaac_ros_vslam improvements for better covariance estimation and planar constraints for mobile robots

  • isaac_ros_nvblox improvements for DNN-based person detection and removal from 3D scene reconstruction

  • isaac_ros_h264_encoder improvement adding H.264 P-frame encode for higher performance and smaller rosbags

  • isaac_ros_h264_decoder improvement adding H.264 decompression on Jetson (aarch64)

  • isaac_ros_dnn_stereo_depth improvement of ESS DNN trained with real data and SDG (synthetic data generation)

  • new package ros2_benchmark for performance measurement of graphs of nodes in open source

  • new package isaac_ros_benchmark building upon ros2_benchmark to provide configurations to benchmark Isaac ROS graphs of nodes

  • open source release for multiple NITROS-enabled hardware accelerated packages

Limitations

This release has the following known limitations, with workarounds available in the troubleshooting section:

  • isaac_ros_triton can under certain conditions report errors of the form Incomplete inference; response appeared out of order.

  • isaac_ros_h264_encoder can become unresponsive when starting a stream after stopping because of a known synchronization bug.

Feature Requests & Issues Addressed

This release contains new features and fixes to address user feedback, including:

Isaac ROS 0.20.0 DP (developer preview) October 19, 2022

Packages available as DP 2 Release tagged v0.20.0-dp.

What’s New

Updates including:

  • support for Jetson Orin Nano 8GB

  • Apache-2.0 licensing for Isaac ROS repositories

  • isaac_ros_compression hardware accelerated H.264 encoding/decoding

  • isaac_ros_depth_segmentation freespace segmentation based on Bi3D, added Isaac Sim tutorials, added RealSense tutorial

  • isaac_ros_mission_client VDA5050-compatible Nav2 mission controller, added Isaac Sim tutorial

  • isaac_ros_dnn_stereo_depth added Isaac Sim tutorial, added RealSense tutorial

  • isaac_ros_image_pipeline added Isaac Sim tutorial, added RealSense tutorial

Limitations

This release has the following known limitations, with workarounds available in the troubleshooting section:

  • isaac_ros_h264_encoder can become unresponsive when starting a stream after stopping because of a known synchronization bug.

Isaac ROS 0.11.0 DP (developer preview) September 1, 2022

Packages available as DP 1.1 Release tagged v0.11.0-dp.

What’s New

Updates including:

  • support for JetPack 5.0.2

  • support for Isaac Sim 2022.1.1

  • isaac_ros_image_pipeline added image flip node

  • isaac_ros_nvblox added support for 3D LIDAR input and serialization of maps to file, improved performance

  • isaac_ros_object_detection accelerated DetectNet inference with NITROS, added Isaac Sim tutorial, improved performance

  • isaac_ros_pose_estimation accelerated DOPE inference with NITROS

  • isaac_ros_depth_segmentation updated Bi3D model, added dynamic disparity level support

  • isaac_ros_visual_slam updated launch files for RealSense package changes, removed stale dependency on isaac_ros_image_proc

Limitations

This release has the following known limitations, with workarounds available in the troubleshooting section:

  • Intel RealSense drivers do not support Humble out-of-the-box (workaround here)

Feature Requests and Issues Addressed

This release contains new features and fixes to address feedback, including:

Isaac ROS 0.10.1 DP (Developer Preview) July 12, 2022

Packages available as DP Release tagged v0.10.1-dp.

What’s New

Minor bug fixes and updates including:

  • isaac_ros_apriltag updated launch file ‘max_tags’ parameter to default 64

  • isaac_ros_argus_camera tuned queue sizes

  • isaac_ros_common add missing dependency on isaac_ros_apriltag_interfaces

  • isaac_ros_dnn_stereo_depth tuned QoS and queue sizes

  • isaac_ros_image_pipeline improved frame synchronization

  • isaac_ros_nvblox fixed integration with Nav2 costmaps on Humble, updated topic names for test rosbag, fixed rosdeps

  • isaac_ros_visual_slam updated launch files for RealSense package changes, removed stale dependency on isaac_ros_image_proc

Isaac ROS 0.10.0 DP (Developer Preview) June 30, 2022

Packages available as DP Release tagged v0.10.0-dp.

What’s New

ROS 2 Humble release of Isaac ROS with performance boost and new stereo perception functions including:

  • packages for ROS 2 Humble (Foxy deprecated) on JetPack 5.0.1 DP

  • support for Jetson Orin

  • support for Isaac Sim 2022.1 (Isaac SIM 2021.2 is deprecated)

  • isaac_ros_nitros implementing type adaptation and type negotiation features new to Humble boosting performance

  • isaac_ros_depth_segmentation for stereo vision detection of obstacles during navigation

  • isaac_ros_dnn_stereo_depth for stereo vision AI prediction of depth

Limitations

There are known limitations with this release, that might have additional details for workarounds in the troubleshooting section:

  • Isaac SIM 2022.1 released in June 2022 will add support for Humble in September. Incompatibilities exist when performing SIL (software in the loop) simulation with Isaac ROS.

  • RealSense drivers as-is do not support Humble, but can be modified to work.

  • isaac_ros_nvblox is untested with Nav2 on Humble.

  • Removed CenterPose support on Jetson.

  • isaac_ros_ess throws an error if using rosbag as input, and input topics are published after the node is started.

Isaac ROS 0.9.3 EA3 (Early Access) March 23, 2022

Packages available as EA3 Release tagged v0.9.3-ea3.

What’s New

GTC 2022 release of Isaac ROS with new packages for vision based autonomous navigation including:

  • packages for ROS 2 Foxy on JetPack 4.6.1

  • isaac_ros_visual_slam upgraded from SVIO as visual odometry source for Nav2 with save and load of feature maps

  • isaac_ros_nvblox for vision based temporary 3D obstacle map construction in real-time

  • isaac_ros_object_detection to detect and classify obstacles using DNN detection networks

Isaac ROS 0.9.1 EA2.1 (Early Access) Nov 22, 2021

Packages available as EA2 Release tagged v0.9.1-ea2.

What’s New

Incremental update with fixes and new packages from previous ROSCon 2021 release, including:

  • packages for ROS 2 Foxy on JetPack 4.6

  • support for Isaac Sim 2021.3

  • isaac_ros_pose_estimation update adding CenterPose DNN for detection of pose

  • Isaac SIM <-> Isaac ROS tutorials with Jetson hardware in the loop

  • new software license with commercial use grant

Isaac ROS EA2 (Early Access) Oct 20, 2021

What’s New

ROSCon 2021 release of Isaac ROS providing hardware acceleration for autonomous robots with new features including:

  • packages for ROS 2 Foxy on JetPack 4.6

  • isaac_ros_visual_odometry providing stereo visual inertial odometry

  • isaac_ros_argus_camera for hardware accelerated ISP of CSI and GMSL cameras

  • isaac_ros_image_segmentation for DNN based image segmentation including people detection pre-trained model

  • isaac_ros_pose_estimation for detection of pose using DOPE DNN

  • isaac_ros_dnn_inference for TensorRT and Triton inferencing server for DNN processing

Isaac ROS EA1 (Early Access) Aug 11, 2021

What’s New

This is the first release of Isaac ROS providing hardware acceleration for autonomous robots with new features including:

  • packages for ROS 2 Foxy on JetPack 4.5

  • isaac_apriltag providing hardware acceleration replacement for apriltag

  • isaac_image_proc providing hardware acceleration replacement for image_proc

  • isaac_stereo_image_proc providing hardware acceleration replacement for image_proc