NVIDIA's Open-Source Physics Engine and OpenUSD Advance Robot Learning

NVIDIA has unveiled new tools and frameworks designed to accelerate robot learning through simulation, focusing on a "sim-first" approach. The announcement, made at the Conference on Robot Learning, highlights key advancements: * **Newton Physics Engine:** A new open-source, GPU-accelerated physics engine co-developed with Google DeepMind, Disney Research, and managed by the Linux Foundation. Built on NVIDIA Warp and OpenUSD, Newton allows robots to learn complex tasks with greater precision. * **Isaac GR00T N1.6:** The latest open robot foundation model, available soon on Hugging Face, integrates NVIDIA Cosmos Reason, enabling robots to understand ambiguous instructions and navigate unforeseen scenarios using reasoning vision language model. * **NVIDIA Isaac Lab 2.3:** The latest version of the open-source robot learning framework built on NVIDIA Isaac Sim and OpenUSD, is now available as an early developer release. Version 2.3 brings new features for robotics researchers, including advanced whole-body control. Leading robotics developers are already adopting these technologies to accelerate physical AI development and deployment, training robots for various real-world applications.