NVIDIA Isaac

NVIDIA Isaac is a robotics platform announced by NVIDIA at Computex 2018, encompassing hardware, software, and a virtual-world robot simulator. The platform has undergone significant evolution — from Isaac SDK and Isaac Sim 2019 (built on Unreal Engine 4), through integration with NVIDIA Omniverse (Isaac Sim 2020.1 Preview), to its current form as a collection of open libraries, frameworks, and AI models.

The platform consists of several main components: Isaac Sim — a simulation application built on NVIDIA Omniverse, supporting URDF/MJCF import, synthetic data generation, digital twins, and ROS 2 integration; Isaac Lab — an open-source, GPU-accelerated robot learning framework built on Isaac Sim; Isaac ROS — a collection of CUDA-accelerated ROS 2 packages with AI models; Isaac Manipulator — reference workflows for robot arms using cuMotion; Isaac Perceptor — reference workflows for autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) using cuVSLAM and nvblox.

The platform supports URDF and OpenUSD standards, sim-to-real pipelines, ROS 2 integration, and physics engines including PhysX, Newton (open-source, co-developed with Google DeepMind and Disney Research), and MuJoCo. Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab source code is available on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license (with separate license terms for Omniverse Kit components). The platform targets deployment on local workstations, GPU servers, NVIDIA Jetson edge devices, and cloud environments (AWS, NGC containers).