NVIDIA released Isaac ROS 5.0 on 22 September at the ROSCon conference in Toronto. It is free and open source, and the theme is that coding agents are now expected to drive the toolchain as well as people are.
The release adds support for ROS Lyrical and Ubuntu 24.04. NVIDIA worked with the Open Source Robotics Alliance to contribute a standard data-handling interface to ROS Lyrical, available to the whole ROS community, with CUDA as a worked example of hardware acceleration through it. New Isaac skills package reusable workflows that a developer or an agent can call: fine-tuning the FoundationStereo perception model to a particular camera setup, and pick-and-place as a standalone skill. The documentation has been rewritten for agents to read.
FoundationPose, NVIDIA’s object pose estimation and tracking model, gains an inference library the company says tracks position and orientation up to 5.5 times faster. Isaac ROS 5.0 runs across the Jetson range, from Orin Nano to Thor. NVIDIA puts the ROS user base at nearly 1.3 million.
The caveat is that much of the announcement is partner testimony, and the 5.5x figure is NVIDIA’s own with no baseline stated. The code, at least, is public.