Isaac ROS 5.0 brings AI agents to robotics development, says NVIDIA

NVIDIA Corp. — isaac ROS 5.0 is already being used by companies including Intrinsic, Mentee Robotics, EKUMEN, and Flexiv. | today released Isaac ROS 5.0, its latest collection of GPU-accelerated packages built on the Robot Operating System open framework.

The company announced the release at the ROSCon conference in Toronto. The release brings new agentic workflows and platform support to help developers build, customize, and deploy robotics applications faster. “The goal is to make everything from development to deployment easier. Whether you’re an individual developer or a full-blown enterprise, there are a lot of headaches that come in the robotics development process,” Katie Washabaugh, NVIDIA’s product marketing manager for robotics simulation, told The Robot Report. In general, NVIDIA said Isaac ROS brings computing, physical AI models and production-ready libraries to the nearly 1.3 million ROS users. The company said this helps developers build high-performance robotics applications using free, familiar, open-source tools. “There’s really a lot of friction in robotics development. There’s so much friction in piecing the plumbing together,” said Washabaugh. “In practice, there are so many things that can go wrong, and so many just frustrating times where you’re just sitting and waiting. So, we really, with this release, took the time to work with the community, work with OSRA, and figure out where we can address these pain points and make it easier for developers.” Magna pairs Isaac ROS with Isaac Sim for hardware-in-the-loop testing for faster deployment. | It is helping developers automate repetitive tasks, navigate complex codebases, and move from ideas to working applications faster. Isaac ROS 5.0 aims to bring these capabilities to robotics development. “The skills we’re releasing with Isaac ROS 5.0, a lot of them get into the nitty gritty, the actual setup,” said Washabaugh. “You can release your agents and have them do all the work of getting the scripts ready, setting up the environment, all that sort of thing. It also does repetitive work like fine-tuning.” Isaac ROS 5.0 also introduces support for ROS 2 Lyrical and Ubuntu 24.04.