NVIDIA Isaac ROS

NVIDIA Isaac ROS is an open-source collection of accelerated ROS 2 software packages for robot perception, navigation and manipulation. Developers combine GPU-enabled components for stereo depth, visual SLAM, object pose estimation, scene reconstruction and motion planning into application pipelines. The software connects camera and other sensor inputs to AI inference and planning on supported NVIDIA computing platforms, with examples for physical robots and Isaac Sim.

Release 5.0, published in September 2026, moved the supported ROS distribution to ROS 2 Lyrical and added Ubuntu 24.04 packages. Accelerated message transport now uses ROS 2's rosidl::Buffer with a CUDA backend, allowing array data to use GPU-backed memory. Applications calling the former NITROS interfaces directly require source changes. The release also supplies agent skills for development and migration, alongside deployment, teleoperation and data tools for building and running robot applications.