Questions about buying into NVIDIA for Robotics and Deep Reinforcement Learning on AGX Xavier

I come from the ROS robotics world. Here are my questions:

1-1 Can a Jetson AGX Xavier double as the hardware to run the complete NVIDIA Isaac Platform during training (including simulation) and the hardware to deploy a trained neural net for a robot? If not, what is the expected work flow with hardware support and its corresponding cost? [* I’m trying to decide if I need to buy desktop/server or just buy the Jetson AGX Xavier and hook it up to monitor+keyboard+mouse…or if this idea of just using the AGX is altogether a wrong concept *]

1-2 Will I have any troubles using the NVIDIA Isaac Platform with the following desktop configuration?
1—CPU: Ryzen 9 3900X 4.6 GHz 12 CPU Core 24 threads
2—GPU: One NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 2080 Ti 1.635 GHz 4352 CUDA Core 11 GB Memory
3—Ram: Vengeance RGB Pro 64gb ram 3600Mhz

2- What additional sensors are available in Isaac Sim? (I know it has RGB-D, Lidar and IMU)
2-1 Pressure sensors?
2-2 IR sensors?
2-3 Other sensors?

3- What robot models are available in Isaac Sim? (e.g. - Webots has many models)

Good questions, thank you. Let me see if I can dig into a few of them with you and clarify the others a bit.

1-1 The AGX Xavier is a target device and comes optionally with the development kit for you to plug in your monitor+keyboard+mouse. It is not intended to be used as a development platform itself. The expected workflow is to have an x86 host machine with NVIDIA GPU where you develop your Isaac application and then cross-compile your work to aarch64 to deploy.

1-2 It depends on your use case and work load, but that does look like a nice rig for sure.

2- There are many sensors Isaac SDK supports and Isaac SIM should support them as well I believe. Here are some of them:
LiDARs

  • Velodyne VLP16 LIDAR
  • Livox Mid-40 LIDAR sensor
  • YD LiDAR

Cameras:

  • Realsense D415 and D435
  • ZED camera (ZED2 coming in next release)
  • Video4Linux (V4L2) cameras
  • Argus CSI cameras

2-1 Pressure sensors: None that are certified or tested yet.
2-2 IR sensors: Could you provide a few examples you have in mind?
2-3 We are testing and certifying more sensors regularly. If you have some that would help you, please let us know.

3 Carter and Kaya are the reference robots tested in Isaac SIM, but you could define and setup your own using URDF (same as Gazebo, at least). See here for Isaac SIM on Omniverse.