NVIDIA has released new open-source models, physics engines and simulation tools for robot research and deployment. The announcements include the Newton Physics Engine, updates to the Isaac GR00T foundation model and new Cosmos world foundation models, all designed to improve how robots learn, reason and transfer skills from simulation to real-world environments.
The Newton Physics Engine, developed with Google DeepMind and Disney Research, is now available in NVIDIA Isaac Lab. Managed by the Linux Foundation, Newton provides GPU-accelerated simulation for complex humanoid movements, such as walking on uneven ground or manipulating fragile objects. Early adopters include ETH Zurich, the Technical University of Munich, Peking University, Lightwheel and Style3D.
NVIDIA also introduced Isaac GR00T N1.6, which integrates Cosmos Reason, an open reasoning model for physical AI. Cosmos Reason enables robots to interpret ambiguous instructions, create step-by-step plans and generalize skills across unfamiliar tasks. The model is available on Hugging Face, with companies including Franka Robotics, LG Electronics and Techman Robot evaluating it for general-purpose robots.
Updates to NVIDIA’s Cosmos world foundation models are designed to generate diverse training data for physical AI. The upcoming Cosmos Predict 2.5 will extend video simulation capabilities, while Cosmos Transfer 2.5 will deliver higher-quality synthetic data in a more compact model.
In Isaac Lab 2.3, NVIDIA introduced a grasping workflow to train robots in manipulating objects under varying conditions. Boston Dynamics has used the system to expand the manipulation abilities of its Atlas humanoid. NVIDIA and Lightwheel are also developing Isaac Lab – Arena, an open-source framework for large-scale evaluation of robot skills in simulation.
To support these workloads, NVIDIA unveiled new infrastructure, including the GB200 NVL72 rack-scale system, RTX PRO Servers and Jetson Thor, a GPU-powered module for real-time robot inference. Partners adopting these systems include Figure AI, Google DeepMind, Mentee Robotics and Unitree.
