Isaac ROS NITROS

Overview

Isaac ROS NITROS contains NVIDIA’s implementation of type adaptation and negotiation in ROS 2. To learn more about NITROS, see here.

Isaac ROS NITROS is composed of a number of individual packages, each with either a functional or structural purpose:

isaac_ros_gxf:

This package serves as a container for precompiled GXF extensions used by other Isaac ROS packages. While a number of GXF extensions used by Isaac ROS are provided with source, the extensions contained in isaac_ros_gxf are license constrained and are thus shipped as .so binaries.

isaac_ros_managed_nitros:

This package contains the wrapper classes that enable developers to add NITROS-compatible publishers and subscribers to third-party CUDA-based ROS nodes. For more information about CUDA with NITROS, see here.

isaac_ros_nitros:

This package contains the base NitrosNode class and associated core utilities that serve as the foundation for all NITROS-based ROS nodes.

isaac_ros_nitros_bridge:

This folder contains the implementation of the NITROS Bridge for inter-process communication.

isaac_ros_nitros_interfaces:

This package contains the definitions of the custom ROS 2 interfaces that facilitate type negotiation between NITROS nodes.

isaac_ros_nitros_topic_tools:

This folder contains a NITROS based implementation of some of the nodes in the topic_tools package.

isaac_ros_nitros_type:

This folder contains a number of packages, each defining a specific NITROS type and the associated type adaptation logic to convert to and from a standard ROS type.

isaac_ros_pynitros:

This folder contains the implementation of Python NITROS.

Quickstarts

• Isaac ROS NITROS

Packages

• isaac_ros_gxf
• isaac_ros_managed_nitros
• isaac_ros_nitros
  • Quickstart
• Isaac ROS NITROS Bridge
  • Overview
  • Performance
  • Packages
  • Quickstart
  • Try Another Example
  • Troubleshooting
  • Updates
• isaac_ros_nitros_bridge_ros2
  • API
• isaac_ros_nitros_topic_tools
  • NitrosCameraDrop Node
• isaac_ros_nitros_type
• isaac_ros_pynitros
  • Creating PyNITROS-Accelerated Nodes
  • Quickstart
  • Try More Examples
  • API Reference

Supported Platforms

This package is designed and tested to be compatible with ROS 2 Jazzy running on Jetson, an x86_64 system with an NVIDIA GPU, or a DGX Spark workstation. Other GB10 based platforms may function, but are not part of the test matrix and we cannot guarantee their behavior.

Platform	Hardware	Software	Storage	Notes
Jetson	Jetson Thor (T5000 and T4000)	JetPack 7.1	128+ GB NVMe SSD	For best performance, ensure that power settings are configured appropriately.
x86_64	Ampere or higher NVIDIA GPU Architecture with 8 GB RAM or higher	Ubuntu 24.04	32+ GB disk space available	CUDA 13.0+ NVIDIA Driver 580+
DGX	DGX Spark	DGX OS 7.2.3	32+ GB disk space available	For best performance, use the supplied power adapter with the DGX Spark system.

Isaac ROS Environment

To simplify development, we strongly recommend leveraging the Isaac ROS CLI by following these steps. This streamlines your development environment setup with the correct versions of dependencies on all supported platforms.

Note

All Isaac ROS Quickstarts, tutorials, and examples have been designed with the Isaac ROS CLI-managed environment as a prerequisite.

Customize your Dev Environment

To customize your development environment, refer to this guide.

Updates

Date	Changes
2026-02-19	Support for DGX Spark and JetPack 7.1
2026-02-02	Point cloud support for CUDA with NITROS
2025-10-24	Add support for CUDA streams in type adaptation
2024-12-10	Update to be compatible with JetPack 6.1
2024-09-26	Update for Isaac ROS 3.1
2024-05-30	Add support for NITROS message filters
2023-10-18	Introducing CUDA with NITROS
2023-05-25	CPU usage optimizations
2023-04-05	Update to be compatible with JetPack 5.1.1
2022-10-19	Minor updates and bugfixes
2022-08-31	Update to be compatible with JetPack 5.0.2
2022-06-30	Initial release