NVIDIA has announced a comprehensive suite of services, models, and computing platforms designed to accelerate the development of humanoid robots on a global scale. The company aims to provide robot manufacturers, AI model developers, and software makers with the tools they need to create the next generation of humanoid robotics.
At the heart of NVIDIA’s offering are the new NVIDIA NIM microservices and frameworks for robot simulation and learning. These pre-built containers, powered by NVIDIA inference software, promise to slash deployment times from weeks to mere minutes.
Two new AI microservices – MimicGen and Robocasa – are set to enhance simulation workflows for generative physical AI in NVIDIA Isaac Sim, a robotics simulation application built on the NVIDIA Omniverse platform.
“The next wave of AI is robotics and one of the most exciting developments is humanoid robots,” stated NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang. “We’re advancing the entire NVIDIA robotics stack, opening access for worldwide humanoid developers and companies to use the platforms, acceleration libraries and AI models best suited for their needs.”
Another key component of NVIDIA’s offering is OSMO, a cloud-native managed service that orchestrates and scales complex robotics development workflows. OSMO significantly simplifies robot training and simulation workflows, potentially reducing development cycle times from months to less than a week.
To address the challenge of capturing vast amounts of data required for training humanoid robots, NVIDIA has introduced an AI- and Omniverse-enabled teleoperation reference workflow. This innovative approach allows researchers and AI developers to generate synthetic motion and perception data from a minimal amount of remotely captured human demonstrations, potentially saving time and reducing costs.
Alex Gu, CEO of Fourier, a general-purpose robot platform company, explained: “Developing humanoid robots is extremely complex — requiring an incredible amount of real data, tediously captured from the real world. NVIDIA’s new simulation and generative AI developer tools will help bootstrap and accelerate our model development workflows.”
NVIDIA is also expanding access to its humanoid developer technologies through three computing platforms: NVIDIA AI supercomputers for model training, NVIDIA Isaac Sim for simulated learning environments, and NVIDIA Jetson Thor humanoid robot computers for running the models. Developers can choose to use all or part of these platforms based on their specific needs.
To further support the developer community, NVIDIA has launched the NVIDIA Humanoid Robot Developer Program. This initiative offers early access to the new offerings, as well as the latest releases of Isaac Sim, Isaac Lab, and Project GR00T general-purpose humanoid foundation models.
Several prominent companies in the robotics field – including Boston Dynamics, ByteDance Research, Figure, and Neura Robotics – have already joined the early-access program.
Aaron Saunders, CTO of Boston Dynamics, commented: “Boston Dynamics and NVIDIA have a long history of close collaboration to push the boundaries of what’s possible in robotics. 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.”
As the field of humanoid robotics continues to evolve, NVIDIA’s comprehensive suite of tools and services is set to play a significant role in shaping the future of this technology.
With the NVIDIA Humanoid Robot Developer Program now open for registration, developers worldwide have the opportunity to access cutting-edge technology and contribute to the advancement of humanoid robotics.
(Image Credit: NVIDIA)
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