Sensors | Isaac Lab

Sensors provide batched measurements of simulation state and camera images.

Choose a sensor

Sensor	Measurement	Typical use
camera	Renderer-produced color, depth, normals, motion, and segmentation images	Vision observations and synthetic data
ray_caster	First collision locations for configurable ray patterns	Terrain sensing, lidar-style queries, and ray-cast cameras
contact_sensor	Net and filtered contact forces, contact points, friction, and contact timing	Locomotion, grasping, and collision events
frame_transformer	Relative and world poses for configured frames	End-effector, foot, and object tracking
imu	Angular velocity and proper linear acceleration	Inertial observations
pva	Ground-truth pose, velocity, coordinate acceleration, and projected gravity	State estimation and privileged observations
joint_wrench_sensor	Incoming joint reaction force and torque	Force/torque sensing and contact-rich control

Sampling and data access

All sensors inherit from SensorBase and share these settings and methods:

prim_path selects the prim or prims measured in every cloned environment.
update_period sets the sampling period in simulated seconds. A value of 0.0 samples every simulation step.
update advances the sensor clock. Sensor data is evaluated lazily when the data property is read, unless recomputation or debug visualization is requested.
reset clears per-environment timestamps and internal state.

Set scene.cfg.lazy_sensor_update=False to refresh data during scene.update(dt). Sensors keep their own sampling periods and reset state. Sensors that support batching refresh together; cameras batch captures by renderer.

Sensor data is exposed through ProxyArray buffers, including camera outputs. Use the torch property for a cached zero-copy Torch view or warp for the underlying Warp array.