ROS2 Lidar PointClouds with Per-Point Timestamps in Isaac Sim

zhengwang · April 17, 2026, 5:32pm

Sorry for my late reply. This feature has been available. Please check out the IsaacCreateRTXLidarScanBuffer.

But the latest version has some bugs that are under investigation.

RTX LiDAR: timestamp length is ~half of point count (XT32 / dual-return), cannot map 1:1 to XYZ

opened 11:19AM - 09 Mar 26 UTC

### Description When using RTX LiDAR in Isaac Sim (tested with the built-in Hes…ai PandarXT-32 10Hz config), [exampel](https://github.com/isaac-sim/IsaacSim/blob/main/source/standalone_examples/api/isaacsim.sensors.rtx/rotating_lidar_rtx.py) the output from IsaacExtractRTXSensorPointCloudNoAccumulator always returns a timestamp array whose length is approximately half of the point cloud data length (often len(timestamp) ≈ len(data)/2 ± 1). This makes it impossible to associate a unique timestamp per point (XYZ) using this annotator. Besides, info.numChannels/numEchos is always zero I also attempted the recommended approach of using IsaacCreateRTXLidarScanBuffer (expecting “timestamp of each return”), but the timestamp length still remains ~half of the number of returns/points in my setup. This behavior is consistent across frames. ### Isaac Sim version 5.1.0 ### Operating System (OS) 22.04 ### GPU Name RTX 4090 ### GPU Driver and CUDA versions Driver Version: 560.35.05 , CUDA Version: 12.6 ### Logs <img width="535" height="566" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/3b9b9a3f-17a4-4456-8149-4fd210978c19" /> ### Additional information _No response_

I will close this topic.

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ROS2 Lidar PointClouds with Per-Point Timestamps in Isaac Sim

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