Demo: Closed-Loop Sionna-Isaac Sim Co-Simulation Framework for Wireless-Aware Robot Navigation over ROS 2

Engineering notes

Engineering notes will be added by the Robot Papers editorial team.

Chinese explanation / 中文解读

中文解读待补充：本站会优先为 VLA、具身智能、人形机器人控制、机器人操作等高价值论文补充中文说明。

Original abstract

A robot that offloads its control loop to the network carries the receiver with it, so link quality is decided by where it goes. Simulating this requires both a physics engine and a site-specific propagation model at once; to our knowledge no simulator natively unifies both, with existing couplings of the two limited to offline analyses. We demonstrate a real-time co-simulation framework coupling NVIDIA Isaac Sim and NVIDIA Sionna over ROS 2 that closes the perception-action-communication (PAC) loop between them. Sionna ray-traces the base-station-to-robot channel over the exact geometry Isaac Sim simulates on, rather than modeling it stochastically, and feeds channel states back into the control loop in real time. Ray-traced on GPU, the coverage map is refreshed in ~16ms (~60 Hz), fast enough for real-time control. To showcase the framework's utility, we implement a wireless-aware navigation application in an OpenStreetMap(OSM)-derived SUTD campus twin with two Nova Carter robots: the closed-loop planner eliminates communication outage at only +7.4% traversal time over the shortest-path baseline (which spends 7.9 s of its 81.2 s run disconnected).

Links and sources

• Official / arXiv page
• PDF from original source

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