NITROS โ NVIDIA Isaac Transport for ROS โ is a ROS 2 transport layer developed by NVIDIA as part of the Isaac ROS ecosystem. It moves data between ROS 2 nodes in a hardware-acceleration-friendly way, minimizing redundant buffer copies.
NITROS implements two native ROS 2 features: type adaptation (REP 2007) and type negotiation (REP 2009). Type adaptation lets nodes operate on their own hardware-friendly data representations (e.g. GPU memory buffers) instead of standard ROS message types. Type negotiation lets adjacent nodes agree on a common data format, so connected GPU-accelerated nodes can exchange data without copying (zero-copy), passing memory handles instead of serialized copies.
The NITROS ecosystem included Managed NITROS (managed publishers and subscribers), CUDA with NITROS (CUDA memory integration), PyNITROS (Python bindings), and the NITROS Bridge (an interoperability layer). NITROS served as the transport foundation for accelerated Isaac ROS packages such as Visual SLAM (cuVSLAM), DNN inference, AprilTag detection, and scene reconstruction.
In Isaac ROS 5.0 (compatible with ROS 2 Lyrical, September 2026) NITROS was marked as deprecated. It is superseded by a native ROS 2 mechanism based on rosidl::Buffer fields and the CUDA buffer backend. Node-level compatibility is maintained, but the NITROS APIs (type adaptation/negotiation, Managed NITROS, CUDA with NITROS, PyNITROS, NITROS Bridge) will be removed in a future release; applications that call them directly require migration.
A Transport Layer is the software layer responsible for data transmission between elements of a robotic or software system โ such as processes, nodes, devices, and services. It handles serialisation, routing, reliability, and latency guarantees for messages. In robotics examples include DDS (Data Distribution Service) used by ROS 2, LCM (Lightweight Communications and Marshalling), ZeroMQ, and proprietary message buses on embedded platforms.
Middleware is a software layer that mediates between applications, services, sensors, drivers, and execution layers. In robotics, middleware is typically responsible for inter-process communication, message passing, hardware abstraction, and module integration within a single system. The most widely used robotics middleware is ROS (Robot Operating System), which provides a publish-subscribe message bus, service calls, and a rich ecosystem of packages.
Transport layer for NVIDIA-accelerated Isaac ROS packages (cuVSLAM/Visual SLAM, DNN inference, AprilTag) on Jetson platforms.
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 'Noble Numbat' โ supported until April 2029. The host for ROS 2 Jazzy.
License family: Proprietary โ Commercial
NITROS deprecated in favor of rosidl::Buffer and the CUDA buffer backend (Isaac ROS 5.0 / ROS 2 Lyrical).
Isaac ROS 4.x series release.
First public developer-preview release of NITROS in the Isaac ROS ecosystem.
