Running the new Isaac Sim ROS/ROS2 Bridge (Isaac Sim 2023.1.0 Release onwards)

Omniverse Isaac Sim
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Dear Users,

The workflow for running the ROS/ROS2 Bridge on Isaac Sim has changed in our latest release of Isaac Sim 2023.1.0! Isaac Sim is now able to use your system level or custom ROS/ROS2 installation!

ROS/ROS2 Installed on the System
If you have (or planning to have) a system level ROS/ROS2 installation, please follow the installation guide to ensure you have all of the required packages installed first. If you are using the ROS2 bridge, make sure the FASTRTPS_DEFAULT_PROFILES_FILE environment variable is also set, as shown in the instructions under “Enabling the ROS / ROS 2 Bridge Extension”.

Make sure to source your ROS environment in your terminal or put it in your bashrc file before running Isaac Sim.

ROS/ROS2 Not Installed on the System
If you don’t have a system level install, Isaac Sim now comes with its own set of minimal ROS2 libraries to fallback on. To uses these libraries you would need to run the following commands in a terminal before running Isaac Sim. Replace <YOUR_PACKAGE_PATH> with the Package Path shown in the app selector (above “Open in File Browser” and “Open In Terminal” buttons).

export RMW_IMPLEMENTATION=rmw_fastrtps_cpp
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:<YOUR_PACKAGE_PATH>/exts/omni.isaac.ros2_bridge/humble/lib

Thanks,
Isaac Sim Team

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Hi @Ayush_G and rest of Isaac Sim ROS2 team. Great job on getting this released, it is a big step in the right direction.

Performance cut with FASTRTPS
We tested the ROS 2 Humble support on a 22.04 system running on a cloud hosted VM through Azure. We have early on seen a drastic performance drop on a vanilla installation of Isaac Sim with FASTRTPS extra args: export FASTRTPS_DEFAULT_PROFILES_FILE=~/.ros/fastdds.xml
inputted. the performance drop is the simulation running with half the FPS going compared to if its not there. In our case the drop is from 50 FPS to 25 FPS on an empty scene.

Out of the box experience
We are around 100 FPS or more on a Windows based system with ROS 2 installed with the same system specifications but are unable to get past 50 FPS and generally performance seems worse in 22.04 than Windows. Not sure this is ROS 2 related though. We cannot use the Windows system due to the unstable nature of ROS 2 and RTX in that environment, amongst other reliability and stability issues.

System
GPU: T4 16GB
RAM: 110 GB
OS: 22.04.3 LTS
Storage: 1000GB SSD (16% used)

Hope this helps the team improve the product as it is quickly moving towards something of a robotics standard - which is awesome!