Possibility of Integrating SOFA with NVIDIA Isaac via Plugin or ROS

[miguel-mmt2]

Hello everyone,

I recently discovered SOFA at a conference two weeks ago, and I was genuinely impressed by its capabilities. Since then, I’ve been diving deeper into the framework to better understand what’s possible.

I’m aware that SOFA supports integration with ROS. However, I’m curious whether anyone has explored or attempted to connect SOFA with NVIDIA’s Isaac software stack—either directly or through ROS as a middleware.

Is there any existing plugin, bridge, or recommended approach to facilitate communication between SOFA and Isaac? I’d love to hear if this has been done before or if there are any resources or best practices to guide such an integration.

Thanks in advance for any insights or suggestions!

[bakpaul]

HEllo !!

Because SOFA has got python3 bindings, you could make a strong bridge using for instance numpy as some sort of "lingua franka", if Isaac is in python it certainly uses numpy somewhere, or is bridgeable to it...

I described the previous one as "strong" because the ROS-based (or any communication framework) is more weak in the way that both doesn't need to be run in the same task, or even on the same computer. To answer that specific point we have two sets of example to do exactly this :

• Using ROS2 : https://github.com/SofaDefrost/SoftRobots/tree/master/examples/sofaros
• Using RPyC with shared memory capability when run on same computer : https://github.com/sofa-framework/SofaPython3/tree/master/examples/RPYC