ZED Isaac™ Sim Extension Overview

The ZED Camera extension for NVIDIA® Isaac™ Sim enables developers to connect the ZED SDK to virtual ZED cameras in Isaac™ Sim, allowing them to seamlessly simulate ZED-based robotics applications.

Some examples of applications:

Smart navigation, where mobile robots autonomously navigate in a virtual environment using the ZED SDK, the ZED ROS 2 Wrapper, and any virtual robot rigged with a ZED camera.
Repeatable testing environment that makes it easier to debug and optimize applications.

This is documentation for the Isaac Sim ZED Extension >= 4.0.0.

You can find the documentation for older versions here.

ZED Camera extension

The extension is available through the Third-Party tab in the NVIDIA® Isaac™ Sim extension manager. It includes the OmniGraph nodes needed to stream data and the USD models of the ZED cameras.

The extension can also be found on the official StereoLabs GitHub repository.

Supported camera models

Type	Model
Stereo	`ZED_X`
Stereo	`ZED_X_4MM`
Stereo	`ZED_XM`
Stereo	`ZED_X_Nano`
Stereo	`ZED_XM_4MM`
Mono	`ZED_XONE_UHD`
Mono	`ZED_XONE_GS`
Mono	`ZED_XONE_GS_4MM`

Mono cameras (ZED X One) can also be paired to create virtual stereo cameras.

Get started

To connect your virtual ZED camera to the ZED SDK, you have to complete the following steps:

Step 1: Install NVIDIA® Isaac™ Sim

The recommended way to install Isaac™ Sim >= 5.0 is to build it from source using the official GitHub repository. You can find the installation instructions here.

Step 2: Install the ZED SDK

The ZED SDK must be installed on the machine running Isaac™ Sim. You can find the installation instructions here.

Step 3: Install the ZED Camera extension

The ZED Camera extension provides the OmniGraph nodes needed to stream data and the USD models of the ZED cameras. Follow the installation instructions to set it up.

Step 4: Add the virtual camera to your simulation

If you haven’t already, we recommend familiarizing yourself with Isaac™ Sim by reading the Isaac™ Sim Main Concepts section of the official NVIDIA® documentation.

Then, get started with the ZED camera in Isaac™ Sim!

ROS 2 integration

Isaac™ Sim can be used to simulate robots and generate ZED data for use with ROS 2 and the ZED ROS 2 Wrapper.

Follow this guide to learn how to configure the Isaac™ Sim ROS 2 Bridge to send simulated information to a ZED ROS 2 Wrapper node.