In July at SIGGRAPH in Denver, NVIDIA Corp. announced research and offerings for simulation, generative artificial intelligence, and robotics. The company said it is providing a suite of services, models, and computing platforms to enable robotics and AI designers “to develop, train, and build the next generation of humanoid robotics.”
“The next wave of AI is robotics, and one of the most exciting developments is humanoid robots,” stated Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “We’re advancing the entire NVIDIA robotics stack, opening access for worldwide humanoid robotics developers and companies to use the platforms, acceleration libraries, and AI models best suited for their needs.”
The company presented 20 research papers at SIGGRAPH. Rev Labaredian, vice president of Omniverse and virtualization strategy, said in a press briefing that NVIDIA has been working on graphics research since 2001, so its connection to graphics, simulation, and robotics is well-established.
NVIDIA NIMs help develop digital twins
Not only can simulation help design robots and their environments, but it can also be applied to training production systems, said NVIDIA. Its NIM microservices are pre-built containers using NVIDIA inference software, now offered as a service. The company claimed that they can reduce model deployment times from weeks to minutes.
“The time to apply generative AI is now, but it can be daunting,” acknowledged Kari Briski, vice president of generative AI software product management at NVIDIA. “Enterprises need a fast path to production for return on investment.”
“Two new AI microservices will allow roboticists to enhance simulation workflows for generative physical AI in NVIDIA Isaac Sim, a reference application for robotics simulation built on the NVIDIA Omniverse platform,” the company asserted.
The MimicGen NIM generates synthetic motion data based on recordings of teleoperation using spatial computing devices such as Apple Vision Pro.
The Robocasa NIM generates robot tasks and simulation-ready environments in NVIDIA’s OpenUSD Universal Scene Description framework for developing and collaborating within 3D worlds.
Available now, NVIDIA OSMO is a managed cloud service that robotics developers can use to orchestrate and scale multi-stage workflows across distributed computing resources, whether on premises or in the cloud.
“Developing humanoid robots is extremely complex — requiring an incredible amount of real data, tediously captured from the real world,” said Alex Gu, CEO of Fourier. “NVIDIA’s new simulation and generative AI developer tools will help bootstrap and accelerate our model-development workflows.”
The company said robotics developers including 1x, Boston Dynamics, ByteDance Research, Field AI, Figure, Fourier, Galbot, LimX Dynamics, Mentee, Neura Robotics, RobotEra, and Skild AI have already joined its early-access program.
“Boston Dynamics and NVIDIA have a long history of close collaboration to push the boundaries of what’s possible in robotics,” said Aaron Saunders, chief technology officer of Boston Dynamics. “We’re really excited to see the fruits of this work accelerating the industry at large, and the early-access program is a fantastic way to access best-in-class technology.”
