Develop a Multi-Robot Environment with NVIDIA Isaac Sim, ROS, and Nimbus

Introduction: The post discusses the development and maintenance of a multi-robot simulation environment using NVIDIA Isaac Sim and Nimbus. The author reviews their past experience with simulating multiple robots and their current progress with Isaac Sim.

Multi-robot simulation with Unreal Tournament game engine: The author's team developed a simulated environment for multi-robot task allocation and teamwork about 20 years ago, which took three years to develop and run reliably for 15 minutes.

Multi-robot simulation with NVIDIA Isaac Sim: Recently, the author's team used Nimbus and NVIDIA Isaac Sim to set up a simulative scenario. Saar Moseri, a computer science student, set up the environment using the Isaac Sim documentation available through NVIDIA NGC. After installing an agent on the simulation machine and creating a gateway node in Nimbus to receive data through ROS, the team deployed the node configuration to the agent running on the simulation desktop. The simulation could be provisioned through remote SSH and monitored from the Nimbus website.

Nimbus robot editor and configuration editor: The team used the Nimbus robot editor and configuration editor to deploy the Isaac Sim configuration. Notifications could be defined by adding conditions on ROS streams in the agent settings.

Conclusion: Developing a multi-robot simulated environment is complex and time-consuming, but it can be simplified with NVIDIA Isaac Sim and Nimbus. The NVIDIA Developer Isaac ROS Forum is a good resource for learning about Isaac Sim. The Cogniteam team is available to help in the process.