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

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).

2 pages, 2 figures. Accepted as a Demo paper at ACM MobiHoc 2026. Demo video: this https URL

Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI); Robotics (cs.RO)

I.2.9; C.2.1; I.6.3

arXiv:2610.08618 [cs.NI]

(or arXiv:2610.08618v1 [cs.NI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.08618 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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