These initiatives will reduce development time and improve performance for developers seeking to incorporate computer vision and AI/machine learning functionality into their ROS-based applications.
Open Robotics will enhance ROS 2 to enable efficient management of data flow and shared memory across GPU and other processors present on the NVIDIA Jetson edge AI platform.
This will significantly improve the performance of applications that have to process high-bandwidth data from sensors such as cameras and lidars in real time.
In addition, Open Robotics and NVIDIA are working to enable seamless simulation interoperability between Open Robotics’s Ignition Gazebo and NVIDIA Isaac Sim on Omniverse.
Isaac Sim already supports ROS 1 and 2 out of the box and features an all-important ecosystem of 3D content with its connection to popular applications, such as Blender and Unreal Engine 4.
Ignition Gazebo brings a decades-long track record of widespread use throughout the robotics community, including in high-profile competition events such as the ongoing DARPA Subterranean Challenge.
With the two simulators connected, ROS developers can easily move their robots and environments between Ignition Gazebo and Isaac Sim to run large-scale simulation and take advantage of each simulator’s advanced features such as high-fidelity dynamics, accurate sensor models and photorealistic rendering to generate synthetic data for training and testing of AI models.
Software resulting from this collaboration is expected to be released in the spring of 2022. Isaac GEMs Released for ROS (Significant Speedup vs CPU only packages) Isaac GEMs for ROS are hardware accelerated packages that make it easier for ROS developers to build high-performance solutions on the Jetson platform.
The focus of these GEMs is on improving throughput on image processing and on DNN-based perception models that are of growing importance to roboticists.
These packages reduce the load on the host CPU while providing significant performance gain. The new Isaac GEMs for ROS include: · SGM Stereo Disparity and Point Cloud · Color Space Conversion and Lens Distortion Correction · AprilTags Detection .
Download Isaac GEMs for ROS here
More Info on Isaac Sim here
Tutorials on Synthetic Data Generation with Isaac Sim here
More Info on Accelerating ML Training with TAO Toolkit here
NVIDIA Jetson & JetPack – details here
NVIDIA DeepStream – details here
NVIDIA Fleet Command – details here
NVIDIA TRITON Inference Server – details here
NVIDIA RIVA – details here