Isaac ROS SIPL Camera#

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Overview#

Isaac ROS SIPL Camera provides ROS 2 camera driver nodes for NVIDIA SIPL (Sensor Input Processing Library) cameras with zero-copy GPU-accelerated image publishing through NITROS.

SIPL is NVIDIA’s modular camera framework for Jetson, providing a unified API and driver model that exposes hardware accelerated ISP for continuous image streaming from sensors. See Introduction to SIPL and the UDDF (SIPL) drivers used to integrate sensors.

CoE is the next-generation Ethernet-based camera transport enabling high-performance, flexible, and scalable camera integration using standard Ethernet networks.

The Holoscan Sensor Bridge (HSB) is the CSI-to-Ethernet bridge hardware that turns MIPI/GMSL sensors into CoE cameras and tunnels their control and image data over Ethernet.

Key features include:

  • Zero-copy CoE image data path from Ethernet (MGBE) to application buffers via hardware DMA, then through hardware-accelerated ISP to CUDA-mapped buffers for ROS publishing

  • Mono and stereo camera nodes with independent capture threads per sensor

  • Zero-copy publisher subscriber messaging in ROS with NITROS

  • Camera calibration importing to publish accurate intrinsics in ROS camera_info for rectification and downstream perception

  • REP-103 static TF publication to define camera and optical frames based on imported calibration data

Known Limitations#

Note

SIPL support for JetPack and CoE stereo cameras is in early development and is expected to improve in future releases. There are limitations of the framework that apply as of the current release.

The following known limitations apply:

  1. Calibration from file import only: The driver does not yet support extracting calibration data from the Eagle camera EEPROM. Import the calibration files to the ROS nodes as described in the Isaac ROS SIPL Camera documentation.

  2. No stereo synchronization: Stereo capture does not synchronize frames or ISP auto-control between left and right sensors. Timestamps of a stereo image pair may differ.

  3. ISP output formats: The node supports only native NV12 or NV24 output from the ISP. Use the ImageFormatConverterNode included in the example launch files for other formats.

Isaac ROS NITROS Acceleration#

This package is powered by NVIDIA Isaac Transport for ROS (NITROS), which leverages type adaptation and negotiation to optimize message formats and dramatically accelerate communication between participating nodes.

Quickstarts#

Packages#

Supported Platforms#

This package is designed and tested to be compatible with ROS 2 Jazzy running on Jetson.

Platform

Hardware

Software

Storage

Notes

Jetson

Jetson Thor

JetPack 7.1

128+ GB NVMe SSD

For best performance, ensure that power settings are configured appropriately.

Updates#

Date

Changes

2026-03-23

Initial release