Simulation ยท Simulation & Digital Twins
NVIDIA PhysX
NVIDIA PhysX is an open-source, multi-platform general-purpose physics engine SDK distributed in the NVIDIA-Omniverse/PhysX GitHub repository. It covers rigid body dynamics, reduced-coordinate articulations (trees of rigid bodies), Finite Element Method soft body simulation, Position-Based Dynamics (liquids, cloth, granular materials), Signed Distance Field colliders, joints, character controllers and scene queries (raycast, overlap, sweep).
It is the primary physics engine of the NVIDIA Omniverse platform and of its reference robotics applications โ Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab. Runs on both CPU and NVIDIA GPUs (CUDA), with a GPU API supporting end-to-end reinforcement learning workflows. The repository also bundles related libraries: Blast (destruction and fracture) and Flow (smoke, fire, combustible fluids). Distributed under the BSD-3-Clause license.
Simulation software is used for modelling, testing, and validating robot behaviours, sensor characteristics, environments, and algorithms without requiring physical hardware. It enables safe, repeatable, and cost-effective development cycles. Common robotics simulators include Gazebo, Isaac Sim (NVIDIA), MuJoCo, PyBullet, and Webots, each offering different trade-offs between physics accuracy, rendering fidelity, and integration with middleware frameworks such as ROS 2.
License family: Permissive
No version history.