Nvidia releases Isaac ROS 5.0 free and open source at ROSCon
The company said the robotics packages add agent-ready skills and support for ROS Lyrical and Ubuntu 24.04, and run on Jetson hardware from Orin Nano to Thor.
Nvidia released Isaac ROS 5.0 on Tuesday at the ROSCon conference in Toronto, and said the collection of GPU-accelerated robotics packages is free and open source. The release adds support for ROS Lyrical and Ubuntu 24.04, according to the company.
The additions Nvidia describes are aimed at AI agents doing robot setup and manipulation work. They include a fine-tuning skill for the FoundationStereo perception model, an inference library for the FoundationPose object pose model, and a standalone pick-and-place skill, the company said.
Two speed figures come from Nvidia and a partner rather than from independent testing. Nvidia said FoundationPose lets robots track an object's position and orientation up to 5.5 times faster. It said Ekumen's isaac_ros_cumotion maps a collision-free path for a warehouse arm in roughly 2 to 5 milliseconds.
The packages run on Nvidia's Jetson line, from the Jetson Orin Nano to Jetson Thor, the company said. Nvidia named RealSense, Intrinsic, Seeed Studio, Magna, Foxglove, Flexiv, Ekumen, Ouster, Universal Robots and ROBOTIS among the companies working with the release.
ROS is an open framework from Open Robotics, and Isaac ROS is Nvidia's set of packages built on it. Nvidia also said the release adds a standard data-handling interface meant to carry GPU acceleration across different hardware.