In January of this year I tried nvblox for the first time, in several different configurations. (on core i9 with RTX4080 and live RealSense and Zed, with Isaac Sim, and with AGX Xavier. There were no surprises, my results looked similar to your documentation with everything looking very “blocky” as expected. I guess that’s where the “blox” name comes from.
Now I set up some new AGX Xavier systems with latest available software (Jetpack 5.15 / Jetson Linux 35.6.2, Kernel 5.10, Ubuntu 20.04, Isaac ROS 2.1)
Because the 2.1 buildfarm is not available, everything is recompiled from sources. (thanks so much for making that possible, we would be stuck with all our AGX Xaviers without that)
I noticed that the background (with all the vertical structures) looks more “smeared” than “blocky”.
There are no changes to your sources and setup, everything exactly as per the documentation except your build script downloads a newer version of librealsense. I tried with both the recommended RealSense firmware 13 and the current firmware 17, same result and by itself the realsense viewer output on its own looks correct either way.
So I have 3 questions:
is the screenshot below as expected for the RealSense viewer version of nvblox 2.1 ? should the vertical structures in the background have a “smeared” look like shown below ?
is it the Zed version or the more recent version of nvblox that makes the background look more “blocky” like the screenshots in your documentation?
in general, i nvblox considered to be more of a technology demo or production ready software for deployment on real robots in warehouses ?
We’re new to Isaac ROS, we’ve been working on Isaac SDK which does not have a direct equivalent to nvblox.
I assume that you’re using the following command we provided on our page when testing the function: ros2 launch nvblox_examples_bringup realsense_example.launch.py
Regarding the “smeared” look, could you check if NvbloxVoxels in the Displays section of RViz is enabled, as shown in the image below?
Since I could not see your configuration of RViz from the post, this setting could be the cause.
Nvblox builds a reconstructed map in the form of a TSDF (Truncated Signed Distance Function) stored in a 3D voxel grid. For more details, please check this link: Nvblox Technical Details.
If NvbloxVoxels is enabled, the visualization should appear “blocky” as you described.
Do you happen to know if the NvbloxVoxels setting was introduced with newer version of Isaac ROS (which would not run on my AGX Xavier systems ?) Or is there something I need to enable in the code or some dependency I need to fix ?
The NvbloxVoxels RViz display is based on the VoxelBlockLayermsg, which was introduced in the release of Isaac ROS 3.2. Unfortunately, this functionality is not available in ROS 2.1.
Please let us know if you need further assistance or have any other questions.
Thank you very much, that explains why there is no NvbloxVoxels setting shown in version 2.1.
However I’m still wondering what else could cause the results for my walls to look much less “blocky” than what is shown in the 2.1 documentation linked below, unless the documentation for 2.1 is inadvertently showing 3.1/3.2 results.
(note that the link and gif copied below are from the version 2.1 documentation, not the 3.2)
I have not made any changes to the Isaac ROS 2.1 code yet, but every time you build, it seems to get a new librealsense. Not sure if that could make a difference.
Thank you for carefully reviewing our documentation. The GIF for the demo was indeed accidentally replaced with an updated version from 3.2.
For version 2.1, only mesh visualization is supported. If you’re using version 2.1, then it’s reasonable not to see the “blocky” effect.
