NVIDIA Launches New Isaac ROS Developer Preview with Open Source Robot Management
Based on the VDA5050 standard and MQTT, Mission Dispatch and Client aim to make management of ROS 2-based mobile robots easy.
NVIDIA has announced a new developer preview release of its Isaac ROS software, bringing with it new task management and monitoring capabilities for autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) — and the company has announced a series of webinars to help ROS 2 developers get started, beginning this November.
"As mobile robot deployment in the real world accelerates, interoperability is becoming increasingly critical," claims Ryan Gariepy, chief technical officer at OTTO Motors, in support of NVIDIA's release. "Bridging VDA5050 with ROS2 as an opensource community will promote innovation in fleet management solutions while allowing robot makers to focus on differentiation."messaging handled by MQTT.
NVIDIA is making Mission Dispatch available as a containerized microservice, with the source code published to the Isaac GitHub repository for those who want to dive into it deeper. The company says it has been verified as compatible with other open source ROS 2 communications clients, including OTTO Motors and InOrbit's VDA5050 Connector. Mission Client, meanwhile, is compatible with the Humble release of ROS 2 and comes as an Isaac ROS package and is pre-integrated into the Nav2 navigation stack.
"As mobile robot deployment in the real world accelerates, interoperability is becoming increasingly critical," claims Ryan Gariepy, chief technical officer at OTTO Motors, in support of NVIDIA's release. "Bridging VDA5050 with ROS2 as an open source community will promote innovation in fleet management solutions while allowing robot makers to focus on differentiation."
As well as the Mission Dispatch and Client platform, NVIDIA also used the event to unveil improved performance for various key Isaac ROS packages including stereo depth perception. The company has also announced a series of free webinars, which are to include question and answer sessions with technical experts, beginning this November with a presentation on high-performance ROS 2 localization with visual simultaneous localization and mapping (vSLAM) on the company's Jetson platform.
Those eager to try out the new release of Isaac ROS can find it on the project's GitHub repository; registration for the first webinar in the series, to be followed by more in December, is available now on NVIDIA's website.