We are pleased to announce the release of Isaac ROS Developer Preview 3 which packs major updates and enhancements. Isaac ROS Developer Preview 3 supports ROS 2 Humble and includes following highlights:
- New Isaac ROS Map Localization: Occupancy grid localizer package using LIDAR to automatically find the pose of the robot for Nav2 in less ½ a second on first start
- New Isaac ROS Benchmark built on the open source ros2_benchmark adding type adaptation and negotiation plug-ins to measure performance of graphs of nodes. See the ros2_benchmark announcement for more details.
- Updated Isaac ROS VSLAM with better covariance estimation, and planar constraints for mobile robots
- Updated Isaac ROS Compression with added P-frame compression to H.264 encoder for higher performance and smaller rosbags
- Updated Isaac ROS Compression with added support for H.264 decoder for decompressing images from rosbag locally on Jetson (aarch64)
- Source release of NITROS providing hardware acceleration with high performance, low latency graphs of nodes using type adaptation (REP-2007) and negotiation (REP-2009)
- Open source release for multiple NITROS accelerated computing packages
- Support for newly released Jetson Orin Nano and Orin NX modules and recently released Ada RTX 40xx series GPU’s/
- WSL2 support for developing on Linux under Windows 11 (experimental)
RVIZ on the left, and Isaac Sim scene top view on the right. Initial global pose of the robot is computed in less than 1 second automatically using the occupancy-grid-localizer package, to start navigation. This removed the need to manually provide the initial pose for Nav2.
This Isaac ROS update is part of our commitment to provide features and hardware acceleration for autonomous robots. Visit Isaac ROS github and get started with Isaac ROS Developer Preview 3 today.