RTX Sensors

RTX sensors in Isaac Sim use the Omniverse RTX Renderer’s RTX Sensor SDK to sense the environment, enabling interaction with materials in visual and non-visual spectra. This means an RTX-based Lidar can model returns from light interaction with transparent or reflective surfaces, and an RTX-based Radar can model returns accounting for material emissivity and reflectivity in the radio spectrum.

Isaac Sim organizes utilities supporting RTX sensors into the isaacsim.sensors.rtx extension, which includes the following sensors:

• RTX Lidar Sensor
• RTX Radar Sensor
• RTX Sensor Annotators
• RTX Sensor Visual Materials
• RTX Sensor Non-Visual Materials

RTX sensors are built using the omni.sensors extension suite. To understand more about how RTX sensors are modeled, and how to build your own, please review the following documentation:

• Omniverse Common Extension

• Omniverse Lidar Extension

• Omniverse Radar Extension

• Omniverse Materials Extension

Motion BVH

RTX sensors use Motion BVH to improve accuracy when modeling motion-related sensor effects, eg. the motion of objects during sensor exposure, or the motion of the sensor itself as it collects data.

By default, Motion BVH is enabled in Isaac Sim 5.0. The following RTX Sensor features are affected by Motion BVH:

• RTX Lidar

  • Motion BVH must be enabled for RTX Lidar motion compensation to work correctly.

• RTX Radar

  • Motion BVH must be enabled for the Doppler effect, and therefore RTX Radar entirely, to be modeled correctly.

Warning

Enabling Motion BVH can significantly increase rendering time, and should be disabled if not needed. See Scene and Rendering Optimizations for more details.