The ZED ROS2 Wrapper on NVIDIA Jetson: Setting Up a ZED X Robotics Stack

The ZED ROS2 wrapper is the open-source package from Stereolabs that runs a ZED camera as a ROS 2 node, publishing its colour images, depth maps, point clouds, odometry, pose and IMU data as standard ROS 2 topics. It sits on top of the ZED SDK, so the depth and positional tracking the SDK computes on the Jetson GPU arrive in your robot software without custom driver code.

For a robot built on a Stereolabs ZED X and an NVIDIA Jetson, that makes the wrapper the bridge between the camera and the rest of the navigation stack. Getting there means four layers lined up in the right order, and most of the time spent on a first build goes into matching their versions.

On a Jetson, the camera data passes through each layer before your nodes see it. For USB cameras such as the ZED 2i the driver layer is not needed; for GMSL2 cameras such as the ZED X, ZED X Mini and ZED X One it is the layer that most often causes trouble.

Our white paper on connecting a ZED X to a Jetson over GMSL covers the hardware side in depth, including the deserialiser, the device tree and the board support package.

Start from the JetPack release on the Jetson, because everything else is chosen to match it. Stereolabs ship the ZED X driver as a Debian package named for the driver version, the ZED Link capture card model and the L4T release, for example stereolabs-zedx_X.X.X-ZED-LINK-DUO-L4T36.X_arm64.deb. Install it with sudo dpkg -i, reboot, and confirm the driver loaded with sudo dmesg | grep zedx. ZED Box computers and partner carrier boards with their own deserialiser use the driver package built for that hardware.

Next, install the ZED SDK for Jetson from its .run installer, choosing the build for the same L4T release. The SDK includes ZED Explorer and ZED Depth Viewer, which are worth opening before ROS 2 comes into it. If the camera streams and shows depth there, any later problem is in the ROS layer, not the hardware.

With ROS 2 installed, the wrapper is cloned into a workspace and built with colcon, following the Stereolabs instructions.

mkdir -p ~/ros2_ws/src/
cd ~/ros2_ws/src/
git clone https://github.com/stereolabs/zed-ros2-wrapper.git
cd ..
sudo apt update
rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src -r -y
colcon build --symlink-install --cmake-args=-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
source install/local_setup.bash

The wrapper supports the long-term ROS 2 releases, Humble on Ubuntu 22.04 and Jazzy on Ubuntu 24.04 among them. On JetPack 6, Stereolabs note that the nvidia-jetpack and nvidia-jetpack-dev packages must be installed first. If a build fails, check that the wrapper release matches the installed ZED SDK version before anything else; older SDK versions are supported through older wrapper releases.

One launch file starts every ZED model, with the camera named by the camera_model argument.

ros2 launch zed_wrapper zed_camera.launch.py camera_model:=zedx

The model values include zed2i, zedm (ZED Mini), zedx, zedxm (ZED X Mini), zedxnano, zedxonegs and zedxone4k. Once it runs, the node publishes topics such as rgb/color/rect/image, depth/depth_registered, point_cloud/cloud_registered, odom and pose, which navigation, mapping and perception packages can subscribe to directly. The separate zed_display_rviz2 package opens a ready-made RViz2 view to confirm the images, depth and point cloud look right.

Parameters in the wrapper’s configuration files then switch on the heavier SDK features, such as spatial mapping, object detection and body tracking, so you only spend GPU time on what the robot uses.

For GMSL2 cameras it also helps to keep the camera, the deserialiser and the module on a single power-up order and to check that the ZED X daemon is running before the node starts, since the wrapper can only open a camera the driver has already enumerated. Logging the ZED SDK diagnostics on first boot gives a reference to compare against if a camera later drops out in the field.

The wrapper runs several cameras on one Jetson, each as its own node with a unique name, and ZED X cameras can be hardware-synchronised so their frames line up. The limit is usually the host. A ZED Box Mini takes two GMSL2 cameras, a GMSL2 capture card such as the ZED Link Quad takes up to eight on a Jetson AGX Orin, and every stream adds to the GPU load.

For teams building on NVIDIA Isaac ROS, the wrapper supports NITROS, NVIDIA’s accelerated transport for ROS 2, so image and depth data can move between GPU-accelerated nodes without extra copies. That keeps a multi-camera perception pipeline efficient on the same Jetson that runs the cameras.

We supply ZED cameras with the Jetson computer they run on, set up and tested as standard, with JetPack, the matching ZED X driver, the ZED SDK and the ZED ROS2 wrapper installed, the cameras confirmed streaming and synchronised, and the launch configuration checked for your camera models. You start from a robot that already publishes depth and odometry, rather than a version-matching exercise.

Browse our GMSL2 cameras and stereo depth cameras, or read our explainer on how GMSL carries camera data.