ZED CUDA Zero-Copy Image Subscriber Example

This example subscribes to a ZED camera image topic using the CUDA zero-copy transport of ROS 2 Lyrical (rosidl::Buffer with the cuda buffer backend) and displays communication benchmarks.

The example runs two benchmark phases on the same topic and compares them:

1. CPU: the subscription accepts only CPU data (the ROS 2 default), so the image is copied from GPU to CPU memory before being delivered.
2. CUDA: the subscription accepts the cuda buffer backend, so the image stays in GPU memory and the subscriber reads it directly from the memory of the ZED node, without copies.

For each phase it reports the subscription frequency, the latency, and the CPU and GPU load.

Requirements

• ROS 2 Lyrical with the rmw_fastrtps_cpp or the rmw_zenoh_cpp (v0.10.5 or newer) middleware (NVIDIA Isaac ROS 5 environment)
• ZED ROS 2 Wrapper v5.6.0 or newer, built with the cuda_buffer package
• The cuda_buffer_backend plugin

Details about the example, the installation, and the usage are available in the Isaac ROS with ZED documentation.

Usage

ros2 launch zed_isaac_ros_cuda_img_sub zed_cuda_img_sub_example.launch.py camera_model:=<camera_model>

Use the topic_name launch argument to select another ZED image topic, for example the depth map:

ros2 launch zed_isaac_ros_cuda_img_sub zed_cuda_img_sub_example.launch.py camera_model:=<camera_model> topic_name:=/zed_isaac/zed/depth/depth_registered