Frequently Asked Questions#
What is Isaac ROS?#
Isaac ROS is a collection of ROS 2 packages for making autonomous robots. The Isaac ROS suite has been developed and released by NVIDIA to leverage the power of NVIDIA acceleration on NVIDIA Jetson and discrete GPUs for standard robotics applications.
A summary of all available Isaac ROS packages is available here.
What is the difference between a repository and a package?#
Each Isaac ROS package is hosted inside an Isaac ROS repository. Most Isaac ROS repositories contain a single Isaac ROS package,
but some contain multiple packages. For instance, the Isaac ROS Object Detection repository contains
the packages isaac_ros_detectnet and isaac_ros_yolov8, which both do object detection but using different models.
How can I use a package?#
Each Isaac ROS package has a detailed quick start under the relevant package (ex: isaac_ros_cuvslam). Additionally, many Isaac ROS packages include more advanced tutorials, such as camera-to-detection compute graph examples and integration with NVIDIA Isaac Sim tutorials.
I have native ROS 2 code, will it work with Isaac ROS packages?#
Yes. Isaac ROS packages use standard ROS interfaces on input and output topics. Where appropriate, Isaac ROS packages are also designed to be drop-in replacements for the commonly-used, CPU-based ROS implementations familiar to robotics developers.
Why is NITROS being deprecated?#
NITROS provided type adaptation, type negotiation, and zero-copy data
transfer for NVIDIA-accelerated ROS graphs. The rosidl::Buffer features
introduced in ROS 2 Lyrical now provide an upstream ROS 2 abstraction for
accelerator memory. Isaac ROS nodes therefore use the ROS 2 CUDA buffer
backend, and the NITROS-specific transport and APIs are deprecated.
Refer to the NITROS migration guide for the compatibility policy and required changes for custom CUDA code.
What should I do if I run into a problem?#
To report issues, you can make a post on the NVIDIA Isaac ROS Developer Forum, or raise a GitHub Issue on a specific Isaac ROS repository.