Generative AI had its big breakout in 2023, and Agentic AI has been one of the trendiest terms of 2024. Could Physical AI join the mainstream in 2025?
If it does, Nvidia and AWS will have played a major role in making it happen, as the companies announced at the recent AWS re:Invent event that Nvidia’s pioneering Isaac Sim robotics development and simulation platform is now available on Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) G6e instances accelerated by Nvidia L40S GPUs. Developers also can use Nvidia’s OSMO cloud-native orchestration platform to assist them in managing their complex robotics workflows across their AWS computing infrastructure.
This move broadens the ability of more developer teams to have access to the tools that can speed up their Physical AI projects, such as humanoid robots and other autonomous machines that need to leverage sensor data to interact with the real world. The announcement with AWS comes several months after Nvidia unveiled Omniverse Cloud Sensor RTX, a set of microservices to be used during development and testing phases to hone the ability of AI to recognize and react to the physical world (Physical AI, according to Google’s Gemini AI tool (Who better to ask?) “refers to a type of artificial intelligence that utilizes real-world sensor data to enable machines to perceive, understand, and reason about the physical environment in real-time.”
Nvidia also stated in a blog post that several robotics companies working in the Physical AI space are leveraging its tools. Those firms include:
Field AI, a builder of robot foundation models, uses Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab to evaluate the performance of these models in complex, unstructured environments across industries such as construction, manufacturing, oil and gas, mining and more.
Vention, which offers a full-stack cloud-based automation platform, is harnessing Isaac Sim for developing and testing new capabilities for robot cells used by small to medium-size manufacturers.
- Collaborative Robotics has used Isaac Sim with its Proxie cobot to help streamline logistics in warehouses, hospitals, airports, and more.
- Standard Bots is simulating and validating the performance of its R01 robot used in manufacturing and machining setup.
- Swiss Mile is using Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab for robot learning so that wheeled quadruped robots can perform tasks autonomously with new levels of efficiency in factories and warehouses.
- Cohesive Robotics has integrated Isaac Sim into its software framework called Argus OSTM for developing and deploying robotic workcells used in high-mix manufacturing environments.
- Aescape’s robots are able to provide precision-tailored massages by accurately modeling and tuning the onboard sensors in Isaac Sim.
Simulation is an important aspect of preparing such machines for real-world deployment, and as Nvidia’s blog post further noted, the new Amazon EC2 G6e instances “provide a 2x performance gain over the prior architecture, while allowing the flexibility to scale as scene and simulation complexity grows. The instances are used to train many computer vision models that power AI-driven robots. This means the same instances can be extended for various tasks, from data generation to simulation to model training.”