NVIDIA Isaac ROS 5.0 Released, Advancing Agentic Open Source Robotics Development

NVIDIA released Isaac ROS 5.0 at the ROSCon conference in Toronto, Canada. It is a collection of GPU-accelerated packages built on ROS, aimed at nearly 1.3 million ROS users and designed to help humans and AI agents build robots together. The release introduces support for ROS Lyrical and Ubuntu 24.04, along with agentic workflows and skills, including setup and manipulation skills, agent-ready documentation, a FoundationStereo fine-tuning skill, and an agent-ready inference library for FoundationPose, which is said to enable robots to perceive and track the position and orientation of objects up to 5.5x faster. NVIDIA also worked with the Open Source Robotics Alliance to contribute a standard data-handling interface to ROS Lyrical, with CUDA providing a working example for GPU acceleration. On the ecosystem side, AgenticROS, an open source project sponsored by RealSense, connects Isaac ROS with NVIDIA Nemotron open models and NVIDIA NemoClaw blueprints; Intrinsic's Open Machine Tending Solution includes built-in compatibility with NVIDIA FoundationPose; and Seeed Studio, Magna, Prefix.dev, Foxglove, Flexiv, Ekumen and Ouster are also adopting or integrating Isaac ROS. Isaac ROS 5.0 supports scalable compute from entry-level NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano to high-performance Jetson Thor devices, and companies including Mentee Robotics and Universal Robots are already using it for humanoid robots and an AI Accelerator SDK. This information comes from NVIDIA's official blog and was organized by AI.