2 posts tagged with "ec2"

This post shows how to deploy an EC2 Spot Instance on AWS capable of running O3DE, Ignition Gazebo, and NVIDIA Isaac Sim at a reduced cost. This Spot Instance is part of a system that uses an Amazon S3 bucket to store project data, such as robot environment levels, and scripts to automate starting up and shutting down instances to save on costs when the simulation instance is not in use; the whole system is deployed using CDK, except for a few manual setup steps.

By the end of this post, you’ll have a fully automated system to spin up high-end GPU simulation machines for a fraction of the usual cost. What's more, you'll have ROS 2 access, remote desktop viewing, and one-line start/stop scripts to manage the instances.

This post is also available in video form. If you'd prefer to watch, click the link below:

Simulators such as Gazebo, NVIDIA Isaac Sim, and O3DE are incredibly helpful tools when it comes to robotics development. Robots are very slow and expensive to develop, and a large part of the reason is not being able to test how the robot works for real because of how slow it is to set up and run tests. With simulations, we can repeatedly run a robot through exactly the same setup every time to see how it behaves, allowing us to more quickly modify the robot software and run it again.

There's one issue - the more realistic the simulation, the more powerful the computer needed to run it. That's where the cloud comes in; instead of buying the hardware outright and running the computer in-house, you can run simulations on demand in the cloud, and only pay for the server while you're using it!

In this post, I'll show you how to run a multi-robot sample simulation using O3DE in the cloud, using an on-demand EC2 instance with graphics hardware available. If you'd like to follow along, this post is also available in video form using the link below: