Isaac Sim

NVIDIA Omniverse™ Isaac Sim, is a scalable robotics simulation application and synthetic data generation tool, built on the NVIDIA Omniverse™ platform. It leverages Omniverse Kit powerful simulation technologies including advanced GPU-enabled physics simulation and photorealism with real-time ray tracing.

Isaac Sim is a physically accurate virtual environment to develop, test, and manage AI-based robots, and provides the essential features for building virtual robotics experiments including:

Tools for importing and simulating robot models, and simulating sensors such as RGB-D, PhysX-Lidar, RTX-Lidar, Radar, contact and IMU

Support for various robotics applications including navigation, manipulation, and AI applications through Python and ROS

Extensive tools for AI applications such as Isaac Replicator for synthetic data generation and domain randomization and Isaac Lab for robot learning

Extensions for building a warehouse such as sim-ready assets, conveyor tools, peoples and CuOpt for logistics and route optimization

Development tools, Isaac Core API is a robotics abstraction layer which hides the USD complexity

Current release: 4.2.0

This release is offered as a container that runs locally or on RTX equipped Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure or Google cloud (GCP) with streaming to the user’s desktop. This cloud-based delivery provides the latest RTX graphics and performance to any desktop system without requiring local NVIDIA RTX GPUs.

What's New in Isaac Sim 4.2.0

General

• Updated to Kit 106.1.0
• RTX based tiled rendering
• Fixed one frame delay between simulation and rendering
• Special mode for zero frame delay between simulation and rendering
• Better stability for MGPU use cases
• Use a more performant ROS2 QOS profile for sensor data

Isaac Lab

• RTX-based tiled rendering support
• Deformable environments
• RL with Multi-agent environments
• Deterministic RL training for environments
• Startup and cloning performance improvements
• Performance optimizations for domain randomization
• Support for command line argument config modification
• Many bug fixes and improvements, including everything mentioned in the Isaac Sim section above

PhysX

• Acceleration computation for rigid bodies was incorrect for both CPU and GPU if velocities were updated by the user in-between simulation steps.
• CPU/GPU differences in resolving maximal-coordinate (e.g. D6) joint constraints with fixed-base articulation roots have been resolved. The behavior is identical now.
• A crash when the articulation joint velocity limit was set to zero is resolved.
• An effective-solver-timestep inaccuracy for the CPU TGS solver with nonzero velocity iterations was resolved.
• A bug in collision resolution where a sphere could fall through a flat triangle mesh when it landed precisely on a mesh vertex.
• Crash fixes for articulations parsing
• Crash fixes for joints UI authoring
• Crash in PhysX inspector
• Collision mesh cache invalidation for topology changes

Replicator

• Fixed pose estimation SDG pipeline slowdown when generating many frames
• Fixed DOPE writer output format
• Changed the Synthetic Data Recorder extension to write data in sync with the stage
• Updated omni.replicator.core to version 1.11.20
  • Fixed crash when capturing data with path tracing in complex scenarios
  • Improved pointcloud annotator performance

Robots

• Humanoid locomotion example
• Quadruped locomotion example

Sensors

• Fixes OgnIsaacPrintRTXSensorInfo crashing if fed data from radar
• Isaac assets creation menu now spawns lidar meshes if they exist, and includes Gemini 335, Gemini 335L, and LeopardImaging Owl
• CameraView API now uses full RTX tiled renderer

ROS

• New ROS 2 Navigation sample with iw.hub robot
• Nova Carter asset now uses Sensor Data QoS profile to publish all sensor data for increased performance
• ROS 2 Foxy is no longer tested or supported, which may affect compatibility with Isaac Sim 4.2 or later. The ROS 2 Foxy Isaac Sim tutorial packages will be removed in a future release.

MetroSim

• ORO extension

  • Several new example description files to show bin pack harmonizer usage.
  • A drop-down box to select description files

• ORA extension

  • Updated the ORA to use omni.anim.navigation-version-106.1
  • Added DHWriter to enable auto-enabling of DH character attributes
  • Use home directory for default writer output
  • Temporarily disabled Lidar and LidarFusion writers, and the -n flag for sdg_scheduler

Prerequisites

Requirements for local deployment:

• Ubuntu 20.04/22.04 Operating System
• NVIDIA GPU (GeForce RTX 3070 or higher)
• NVIDIA GPU Driver (recommended version 535.129.03)
• Docker
• NVIDIA Container Toolkit (minimum version 1.16.2)

Running Isaac Sim

Steps:

1. Run the command below to confirm your GPU driver version is 535.129.03 or later.

   $ nvidia-smi
   

2. Pull the Isaac Sim container.

   $ docker pull nvcr.io/nvidia/isaac-sim:4.2.0
   

3. Run the Isaac Sim container with an interactive Bash session.

   $ docker run --name isaac-sim --entrypoint bash -it --runtime=nvidia --gpus all -e "ACCEPT_EULA=Y" --rm --network=host \
        -e "PRIVACY_CONSENT=Y" \
        -v ~/docker/isaac-sim/cache/kit:/isaac-sim/kit/cache:rw \
        -v ~/docker/isaac-sim/cache/ov:/root/.cache/ov:rw \
        -v ~/docker/isaac-sim/cache/pip:/root/.cache/pip:rw \
        -v ~/docker/isaac-sim/cache/glcache:/root/.cache/nvidia/GLCache:rw \
        -v ~/docker/isaac-sim/cache/computecache:/root/.nv/ComputeCache:rw \
        -v ~/docker/isaac-sim/logs:/root/.nvidia-omniverse/logs:rw \
        -v ~/docker/isaac-sim/data:/root/.local/share/ov/data:rw \
        -v ~/docker/isaac-sim/documents:/root/Documents:rw \
        nvcr.io/nvidia/isaac-sim:4.2.0
   

4. Start Isaac Sim.

   $ ./runheadless.native.sh -v
   

This will download and launch the Isaac Sim container in headless mode.

Note:

• By using the -e "ACCEPT_EULA=Y" flag, you are accepting the NVIDIA Omniverse License Agreement of the image.
• By using the -e "PRIVACY_CONSENT=Y flag, you opt-in to the data collection agreement found at Omniverse Data Collection & Use FAQ. You may opt-out by not setting this flag.
• The -e "PRIVACY_USERID= flag can optionally be set for tagging the session logs.

Refer to our Isaac Sim User Guide and Isaac Sim Setup FAQ for more information.

Livestreaming Isaac Sim Remotely

See Livestream Clients in our User Guide to connect to Isaac Sim using your desktop. The default livestream client is Omniverse Streaming Client.

License

By pulling and using the container, you accept the terms and conditions of the NVIDIA Omniverse License Agreement.

Sources for OSS packages used in this container can be found here.

Suggested readings:

• Release Notes
• Documentation
• NVIDIA Forums