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ZDNET's key takeaways
- Nvidia releases new physical AI models at CES.
- Partners unveil next-generation robots.
- The robots span a wide range of use cases and industries.
As AI models continue to gain popularity, there is an increased focus on developing hardware that bridges the gap between a device's screen and the world around us. As a result, physical AI is an emerging theme at CES, and Nvidia unveiled models to accelerate the development of these robots.
"The ChatGPT moment for robotics is here. Breakthroughs in physical AI -- models that understand the real world, reason and plan actions -- are unlocking entirely new applications," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia.
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To drive that momentum forward, Nvidia unveiled new open Nvidia Cosmos and GR00T models during its Las Vegas keynote event on Monday. The company stated that these models are designed to enable developers to allocate less time and resources to pretraining and more to building next-generation robots.
The new models
In particular, the releases include Nvidia Cosmos Transfer 2.5 and Nvidia Cosmos Predict 2.5, open, fully customizable world models that also understand the real world around you, including its physics and spatial properties. This is useful for creating synthetic data and simulations that emulate realistic life scenarios for evaluating robots' performance, necessary because testing these physical AI developments, such as autonomous vehicles, is often too risky to conduct in real life.
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Nvidia Cosmos Reason 2 is an open-reasoning vision language model (VLM) that allows intelligent machines "to see, understand, and act in the physical world like humans," according to Nvidia. Moreover, using Nvidia Cosmos Reason 2, physical AI can make decisions as humans do, using reason, prior knowledge, understanding of physics, and more.
Lastly, Nvidia Isaac GR00T N1.6 is an open-reasoning vision language action (VLA) model specifically designed for humanoid robots, enabling full-body control and leveraging Nvidia Cosmos Reason for the additional benefits discussed above. The new models are all available on Hugging Face.
Simulations
Benchmarking and simulations are essential for ensuring the safe development of autonomous systems, but they are often one of the most challenging components of robotics due to the difficulty in creating these simulations. To help bridge this gap, Nvidia released new open-source frameworks on GitHub, including the Nvidia Isaac Lab-Arena and Nvidia OSMO.
The Nvidia Isaac Lab-Arena is an open-source framework designed for large-scale robot policy evaluation and benchmarking in simulation, according to the blog post. It was designed in close collaboration with Lightwheel, an embodied AI infrastructure company, and connects to industry-leading benchmarks.
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Nvidia Osmo is designed to help developers with the robot training workflow. In particular, it can help speed up the process by allowing developers to run workflows, such as model training, across different compute environments from one central command center.
Nvidia said it is working with Hugging Face to integrate open-source Isaac and GR00T technologies into the LeRobot open-source robotics framework, making it easier for developers of all experience levels to access Nvidia technologies in robot development. GR00T N1.6 and Isaac Lab-Arena are now available in the LeRobot library.
Part of the collaboration also makes Hugging Face's open-source Reachy 2 humanoid robot work seamlessly with Nvidia's Jetson Thor hardware. Similarly, Hugging Face's open-source Reachy Mini tabletop robot is fully interoperable with Nvidia DGX Spark.
Bigger picture
Leading robotics companies, including Boston Dynamics, Richtech, Humanoid, LG Electronics, and Neura Robotics, have all debuted new robots and autonomous machines built using Nvidia technologies, integrating the company's Jetson Thor robotics platform.
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These robots all assist with different tasks. For example, Richtech Robotics is launching Dex, a humanoid robot for industrial environments, while LG Electronics unveiled a new home robot for indoor household tasks. The CES announcements include a new Nvidia Blackwell-powered Jetson T4000 module, which the company claimed delivers four times the performance of the previous generation.
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