Major Robotics Innovations from NVIDIA: ‘The Pace is Incredible’

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From its central position in the AI boom, NVIDIA announced several server and simulation tools at this week’s SIGGRAPH conference in Vancouver, highlighting advancements aimed at accelerating AI for robotics. The company said that physical AI, designed to understand and interact with the real world, will be the next frontier in artificial intelligence. 

Physical AI enhances robotics 

NVIDIA announced three major categories of tools to enable industrial or physical AI and robotic simulation:

• New Omniverse SDKs and libraries for world simulation.
• Significant updates to Cosmos world foundation models for physical AI reasoning. 
• Expanded AI computing infrastructure. 

“The pace is incredible,” said Rev Lebaredian, vice president of Omniverse and simulation technologies at NVIDIA. “I don’t think we’ve ever had this much momentum, this many resources, dedicated to robotics and robotics research and applications of robotics ever in human history. So we’re seeing new things every month, every week.”

These let developers train AI systems that understand the physical world, suitable for industrial robotics solutions. New Omniverse NuRec SDKs and libraries introduce Omniverse RTX ray-traced 3D Gaussian splatting, a rendering technique that enables developers to run simulations under real-world physical conditions in 3D using sensor data.

Meanwhile, updates to Cosmos World Foundation models expand the world simulation options. A distilled version of Cosmos Transfer generates synthetic data for what NVIDIA describes as infinite options for scenes, while Cosmos Transfer-2 speeds up photorealistic synthetic data generation. Another tool, Cosmos Predict, generates an image-to-future-world-state. 

Another addition, Cosmos Reason, is a 7-billion-parameter reasoning vision language model that solves multi-step tasks, handles ambiguity, and reacts to new, unseen experiences in physical AI, edge, and robotics deployments. 

“By combining AI reasoning with scalable, physically accurate simulation, we’re enabling developers to build tomorrow’s robots and autonomous vehicles that will transform trillions of dollars in industries,” Lebaredian said in the NVIDIA press release. 

The new libraries and tools are available as of Aug. 11. 

Editor’s note: This article was adapted from an article originally published on our sister site TechRepublic.

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