Release Notes

Isaac ROS 3.2 Update 4 February 13, 2025

Packages available as 3.2 Update 4 tagged v3.2-4 on GitHub.

Feature Requests & Issues Addressed

This release contains fixes to address user feedback, including:

Isaac ROS 3.2 Update 3 February 6, 2025

Packages available as 3.2 Update 3 tagged v3.2-3 on GitHub.

What’s New

Updates including:

  • support for Isaac Sim 4.5

Isaac ROS 3.2 Update 2 January 30, 2025

Packages available as 3.2 Update 2 tagged v3.2-2 on GitHub.

What’s New

Updates including:

  • isaac_ros_common: Improve container security

  • isaac_ros_cumotion: Improve input validation

  • isaac_ros_nitros: Improve unit test robustness

  • isaac_ros_visual_slam: Reduced image buffer size

Isaac ROS 3.2 Update 1 January 16, 2025

Packages available as 3.2 Update 1 tagged v3.2-1 on GitHub.

What’s New

Updates including:

  • support for JetPack 6.2 and Jetson Orin Nano Super

  • isaac_ros_benchmarks: Update benchmarks for Jetson Orin Nano Super

  • isaac_ros_common: Update build tools installation

Isaac ROS 3.2 December 10, 2024

Packages available as 3.2 Release tagged v3.2 on GitHub.

What’s New

Updates including:

  • support for JetPack 6.1 / Ubuntu 22.04 on CUDA 12.6 (only)

  • tested with Isaac Sim 4.2

  • Isaac Perceptor end-to-end workflow with vision-only mapping, localization, and obstacle perception for AMR navigation

  • Isaac Manipulator pick-and-place workflow with pose estimation, grasping, and trajectory generation

  • Isaac Manipulator workflows (pose-to-pose, object-following, and pick-and-place) available in Isaac Sim

  • PyNITROS: Python API for CUDA with NITROS support with PyTorch tensors and images

  • Nova Event Data Recorder for collecting data during live operation

  • Nova online sensor monitoring diagnostics and offline data validation

  • verified Isaac Perceptor with new multi-cam rigs including Orbbec

  • isaac_mapping_ros: Add offline map creation

  • isaac_ros_pose_estimation: Improve FoundationPose performance and accuracy with multiple refinement, particularly for symmetric objects

  • isaac_ros_nvblox: Improve fine-grained ~1cm voxel resolution, bounded workspace support, and multi-cam for workcell applications, dynamic mode support for Nova Carter/Nova Developer Kit, improved people detection for RealSense

  • isaac_ros_visual_global_localization: Add multi-cam visual global localization

  • isaac_ros_visual_slam: Add multi-cam SLAM mode localization

Limitations

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

  • Nova Calibration Tool is deprecated.

  • The Debian package for isaac_ros_pynitros can only be installed inside the Isaac ROS Docker container.

  • Significant frame drops during data recording may occur in dark or occluded scenes due to excessive image noise exacerbating compression compute load.

  • Isaac Perceptor during startup may hang due to camera drop frames. Restart the launch file to recover.

Isaac ROS 3.1 September 26, 2024

Packages available as 3.1 Release tagged v3.1 on GitHub.

What’s New

Updates including:

  • restored ZED support

  • tested with Isaac Sim 4.1

Limitations

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

  • Isaac Sim 4.2 not yet supported

  • Isaac Perceptor workflows only support Isaac Sim 4.0

Isaac ROS 3.0.1 June 14, 2024

Packages available as 3.0.1 Release tagged v3.0.1 on GitHub.

What’s New

Updates including:

  • tested with Isaac Sim 4.0

  • Isaac Sim NITROS Bridge support

  • Improved Isaac Perceptor low-lying obstacle detection through new camera/ground calibration for Nova Developer Kit

Limitations

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

  • Latest RealSense firmware (5.16.0.1) and librealsense (2.55.1) introduced breaking changes. Reverted to building supported versions from source.

Isaac ROS 3.0.0 May 30, 2024

Packages available as 3.0.0 Release tagged v3.0.0 on GitHub.

What’s New

Updates including:

  • support for JetPack 6.0 / Ubuntu 22.04 on CUDA 12.2 (only)

  • tested with Isaac Sim 2023.1.1

  • Introducing Isaac Manipulator reference workflows for perception-driven manipulation

  • Introducing Isaac Perceptor reference workflows for visual odometry and obstacle perception

  • Improved documentation with tabbed quickstarts for source/binary and image providers

  • isaac_ros_benchmark: Add multi-cam benchmarks

  • isaac_ros_common: Improvements to run_dev.sh, add Docker deployment scripts

  • isaac_ros_cumotion: New cuMotion package and MoveIt! plugin

  • isaac_ros_dnn_inference: Decomposed DNN image encoder nodes

  • isaac_ros_ess: Update for ESS 4.0 improved for workcell manipulation use cases

  • isaac_ros_foundationpose: Add NITROS FoundationPose decoder

  • isaac_ros_image_proc: Add crop/resize nodes

  • isaac_ros_jetson_stats: Add jtop package

  • isaac_ros_mission_client: New Nav2 docking support

  • isaac_ros_nitros: Add message_filter support for CUDA with NITROS

  • isaac_ros_nova: New data recorder/replayer, rosbag validation tools

  • isaac_ros_nitros_bridge: Add support for Jetson

  • isaac_ros_nvblox: New multi-cam scene reconstruction, add NITROS support, Foxglove viz plugin

  • isaac_ros_rtdetr: Add NITROS RT-DETR support for SyntheticaDETR models

  • isaac_ros_segformer: Add NITROS Segformer decoder

  • isaac_ros_segment_anything: Add NITROS Segment Anything (SAM) decoder

  • isaac_ros_visual_slam: New multi-cam visual odometry, add NITROS support

Limitations

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

  • Known stability issues and frame drops under high CPU load in multi-cam configurations

  • Known disconnect issues with Nova Carter WiFi + Bluetooth when switching access points during teleoperation

  • Known high latency issue of Isaac ROS FoundationPose pipeline with Hawk cameras

  • Removed support for JetPack 5.1.2, Ubuntu 20.04, and Jetson Xavier

  • Removed support for Stereolabs ZED cameras until ZED SDK support for JP6 is available

  • ROS 1 Noetic not supported on Ubuntu 22.04 for use with Isaac ROS NITROS Bridge

  • Known issue with setting use_intra_process_comms explicitly to True in ROS graphs with NITROS nodes. See workaround here.

Feature Requests & Issues Addressed

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

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: Add live mode benchmarking capability

  • isaac_ros_managed_nitros_examples: Add CV-CUDA DNN Image Encoder example

  • isaac_ros_unet: Improve 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: Improve throughput performance, expose new tuning parameters

  • isaac_ros_centerpose: Add NITROS CenterPose decoder

  • isaac_ros_ess: Update for ESS 3.0 with confidence thresholding in multiple resolutions

  • isaac_ros_h264_decoder: Add support on aarch64

  • isaac_ros_h264_encoder: Add support on x86_64

  • isaac_ros_managed_nitros: Introduce CUDA with NITROS

  • isaac_ros_mission_client: Add mission cancellation and improved stability

  • isaac_ros_nitros_bridge: Introduce support for ROS 1 Noetic

  • isaac_ros_nova: New support packages for Nova sensor suite

  • isaac_ros_nvblox: New general dynamics detection, improve stability and performance

  • isaac_ros_stereo_image_proc: Add confidence thresholding for SGM

  • isaac_ros_yolov8: Add NITROS YOLOv8 decoder

  • isaac_ros_visual_slam: Improve 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: Update 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: Improve stereo rectification

  • 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 NVIDIA-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: NVIDIA-accelerated H.264 encoding/decoding

  • isaac_ros_depth_segmentation: Freespace segmentation based on Bi3D, add Isaac Sim tutorials, add RealSense tutorial

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

  • isaac_ros_dnn_stereo_depth: Add Isaac Sim tutorial, add RealSense tutorial

  • isaac_ros_image_pipeline: Add Isaac Sim tutorial, add 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: Add image flip node

  • isaac_ros_nvblox: Add support for 3D LIDAR input and serialization of maps to file, improve performance

  • isaac_ros_object_detection: Accelerate DetectNet inference with NITROS, add Isaac Sim tutorial, improve performance

  • isaac_ros_pose_estimation: Accelerate DOPE inference with NITROS

  • isaac_ros_depth_segmentation: Update Bi3D model, add dynamic disparity level support

  • isaac_ros_visual_slam: Update launch files for RealSense package changes, remove 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: Update launch file ‘max_tags’ parameter to default 64

  • isaac_ros_argus_camera: Tune queue sizes

  • isaac_ros_common: Add missing dependency on isaac_ros_apriltag_interfaces

  • isaac_ros_dnn_stereo_depth: Tune QoS and queue sizes

  • isaac_ros_image_pipeline: Improve frame synchronization

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

  • isaac_ros_visual_slam: Update launch files for RealSense package changes, remove 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: Implement 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: Upgrade 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 NVIDIA acceleration for autonomous robots with new features including:

  • packages for ROS 2 Foxy on JetPack 4.6

  • isaac_ros_visual_odometry: Provide stereo visual inertial odometry

  • isaac_ros_argus_camera: For NVIDIA-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 NVIDIA acceleration for autonomous robots with new features including:

  • packages for ROS 2 Foxy on JetPack 4.5

  • isaac_apriltag: Provide NVIDIA accelerated replacement for apriltag

  • isaac_image_proc: Provide NVIDIA accelerated replacement for image_proc

  • isaac_stereo_image_proc: Provide NVIDIA accelerated replacement for image_proc