IsaacSim-Nav: High-Fidelity Digital Twin Platform for Autonomous Navigation

SHORT SUMMARY 

This digital TestBed is an advanced simulation environment built on NVIDIA Isaac Sim (Omniverse), specifically tailored for the development and benchmarking of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs). It provides a high-fidelity “Digital Twin” infrastructure where users can test navigation stacks (such as ROS 2 Nav2) in photorealistic environments with accurate physics. The platform enables complex scenario testing, including multi-robot simulation infrastructure for coordination research, dynamic obstacle avoidance, and sensor fusion (LiDAR, Depth Cameras, IMU) without the risk of hardware damage. Its key differentiator is the high-fidelity sensor simulation and the ability to easily bridge the “Sim-to-Real” gap. It serves as a primary tool for researchers and students to validate algorithms in varied industrial and office-like 3D scenes before physical deployment.

HOSTING INSTITUTION AND PI INFO

Name of Host Organization University of Belgrade, School of Electrical Engineering
Department or Lab ETF Robotics
Name of Building Main building ETF
Physical Address Bulevar kralja Aleksandra 73, Belgrade, Serbia
Website Links https://www.etf.bg.ac.rs/en
Institutional contact name dr Kosta Jovanović
Institutional contact email kostaj@etf.bg.ac.rs

APPLICATION CASES 

Application case: Short description:
Warehouse AMR Navigation Testing an Autonomous Mobile Robot (AMR) in a cluttered warehouse scene to evaluate path planning robustness.
Sim-to-Real Validation Comparing the behavior of a digital twin (e.g., TurtleBot or Nova Carter) against its physical counterpart at ETF Lab.
Socially-Aware Navigation Simulating robot movement in corridors with dynamic human-like characters (NPCs) to test avoidance logic.

POTENTIAL STAKEHOLDERS

Non-academic stakeholders

Industrial Partners, Startups, SMEs

Academic stakeholders

Undergraduate students, PhD students, MSc students, Researchers

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