Custom Robot in 15 min | Issac Sim | Nvidia Issac

Wish to get into the shoes of a Robotics Software Engineer without having to invest on any actual hardware. NVIDIA Omniverse™ Isaac Sim is a robotics simulation toolkit for the NVIDIA Omniverse™ platform. Soft_illusion Channel is back with a new video to show you how you can make your own robot on this simulator..!! (A channel that aims to help the robotics community).
#ISSACsim #nvidia #robotics
0:20 Introduction for Video
0:56 Add Ground plane
1:08 Create Body
3:00 Add material to robot
6:40 Add a joint
7:58 Add a Drive
8:57 Add remaining wheels
11:35 Add articulated root
13:39 Add multiple robots
Steps to install Nvidia Isaac Sim:
Download Omniverse : docs.omniverse...
Navigate to the Exchange Tab on Omniverse and click on Nvidia Issac.
NVIDIA Isaac 101 Video :
• Get Started With Issac...
Omniverse Isaac Sim’s GUI interface features are the same ones used in NVIDIA Omniverse™ USD Composer, an application dedicated to world-building. In this tutorial series, we will focus on the GUI functions that are most relevant to robotic uses. For more sophisticated general world creation, please check out Omiverse Create. In this tutorial, we will rig a simple “robot” with three links and two revolute joints to introduce the basic concepts of joints and articulations. We will take the objects that were added to the stage in Add Simple Objects, and turn them into a mock mobile robot with rectangular body and four cylindrical wheels.
In this video, the below steps have been followed to create our custom robot :
Step 1: Add a Ground plane
Step 2: Create a custom robot body using shapes described in the previous video. We make a 4-wheeled robot here; which uses the shapes : Cube and 4 Cylinders. The translation and orientation for the shapes are set and then physics is added. This includes Rigid Body, Collision, Friction and Contact parameters. We then add colors to the robot, red for the body and green for the wheels.
Step 3: Once the robot body/shape is ready, we move on to adding joints to the body. We navigate to Physics - Joints and add a Revolute joint. We set the local position, rotation and axis for the joint.
Step 4: The next step is to add a Drive to the joint. In this case we select the angular drive. We also add Position and Velocity Control. For position controlled joints, set a high stiffness and relatively low or zero damping. For velocity controller joints, set a high damping and zero stiffness. For joints on a wheel, it makes more sense to be velocity controlled, so we set both wheels’ Damping to 1e4*and *Target Velocity to 200. If you are working with joints with limited range, those can be set in the Property tab, under the Raw USD Properties - Lower (Upper) Limit. Press Play to see our mock mobile robot drive off. Press play and robot does a cartwill.
Step 5: To make the robot stable we select Articulation Root in the Physics Tab. You can see that the robot is touching the ground by navigating to Physics - Colliders - All. The robot can now be seen moving.
Step 6: In the last step of the robot we show how a multi-robot scene can be created using the same robot that we just created.
Here is more info by NVIDIA on how you can add joints and articulation :
Add Joint Drive
Adding the joint is only adding the mechanical connection. To be able to control and drive the joints, we need to add a joint drive API. Select both joints and click the + Add button in the Property tab, and select Physics - Angular Drive to add drive to both joints simultaneously.
Position Control: for position controlled joints, set a high stiffness and relatively low or zero damping.
Velocity Control: for velocity controller joints, set a high damping and zero stiffness.
Add Articulation
Even though directly driving the joints can move the robot, it is not the most computationally efficient way. Making things into articulations can achieve higher simulation fidelity, fewer joint errors, and can handle larger mass ratios between the jointed bodies. You can read more regarding the physics simulation behind it in Physics Core: Articulation. To turn a series of connected rigid bodies and joints into articulation, we need to set an articulation root to anchor the articulation tree. According to instructions on defining articulation trees in Physics Core: Articulation:
For a fixed-base articulation, add the Articulation Root Component either to: 1) the fixed joint that connects the articulation base to the world, or 2) an ancestor of the fixed joint in the USD hierarchy. The second option allows creating multiple articulations from a single root component added to the scene: Each descendant fixed joint will be defining an articulation base link. For a floating-base articulation, add the Articulation Root Component either to: 1) the root rigid-body link or 2) an ancestor of the root link in the USD hierarchy.