Using NVIDIA ISAAC ROS to speed up image processing

Processing large amounts of data, such as images or point clouds, can lead to performance issues if algorithms cannot handle the resource demands. To address this, developers have begun leveraging the high computational power of GPUs. This shift has been driven by the popularity of NVIDIA Jetson computers, which are compact devices equipped with powerful GPUs, making them ideal for robotics applications. In this view, NVIDIA directly supports the ROS 2 developers by providing a collection of packages that solve robotics perception problems by directly exploiting the GPU, and directly communicating with the ROS 2 ecosystem. This collection of packages is known as NVIDIA ISAAC ROS and covers many problems of robotic perception.

In this section, we will learn how NVIDIA ISAAC is structured and how to install it on our machines, running some of the ROS 2 nodes implemented in this package collection.

ISAAC structure

Before...