John Welsh

Mayank Mittal, Pascal Roth, James Tigue et al. · nvidia

We present Isaac Lab, the natural successor to Isaac Gym, which extends the paradigm of GPU-native robotics simulation into the era of large-scale multi-modal learning. Isaac Lab combines high-fidelity GPU parallel physics, photorealistic rendering, and a modular, composable architecture for designing environments and training robot policies. Beyond physics and rendering, the framework integrates actuator models, multi-frequency sensor simulation, data collection pipelines, and domain randomization tools, unifying best practices for reinforcement and imitation learning at scale within a single extensible platform. We highlight its application to a diverse set of challenges, including whole-body control, cross-embodiment mobility, contact-rich and dexterous manipulation, and the integration of human demonstrations for skill acquisition. Finally, we discuss upcoming integration with the differentiable, GPU-accelerated Newton physics engine, which promises new opportunities for scalable, data-efficient, and gradient-based approaches to robot learning. We believe Isaac Lab's combination of advanced simulation capabilities, rich sensing, and data-center scale execution will help unlock the next generation of breakthroughs in robotics research.

Abrar Anwar, John Welsh, Joydeep Biswas et al.

Navigating and understanding complex environments over extended periods of time is a significant challenge for robots. People interacting with the robot may want to ask questions like where something happened, when it occurred, or how long ago it took place, which would require the robot to reason over a long history of their deployment. To address this problem, we introduce a Retrieval-augmented Memory for Embodied Robots, or ReMEmbR, a system designed for long-horizon video question answering for robot navigation. To evaluate ReMEmbR, we introduce the NaVQA dataset where we annotate spatial, temporal, and descriptive questions to long-horizon robot navigation videos. ReMEmbR employs a structured approach involving a memory building and a querying phase, leveraging temporal information, spatial information, and images to efficiently handle continuously growing robot histories. Our experiments demonstrate that ReMEmbR outperforms LLM and VLM baselines, allowing ReMEmbR to achieve effective long-horizon reasoning with low latency. Additionally, we deploy ReMEmbR on a robot and show that our approach can handle diverse queries. The dataset, code, videos, and other material can be found at the following link: https://nvidia-ai-iot.github.io/remembr