18 Sep
Isaac Sim 7.0.0 Alpha 1 is tagged on GitHub (tool · 1 minute read)
Isaac Sim has tagged release v7.0.0a1, its 7.0.0 Alpha 1, on GitHub.
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17 items · newest first
simulation
Simulators, scene assets, physics plugins and sim-to-real results.
17 Sep
Isaac Lab 3.0 Early Access puts one task API across physics and rendering backends (tool · 8 minute read)
Isaac Lab 3.0 Early Access brings one task API across multiple physics, rendering and visualization backends, so supported tasks can switch between them without rewriting the environment. Many workflows now run kit-less, without installing or launching Isaac Sim, and a new isaaclab command replaces library-specific training and playback scripts. Quaternions change from WXYZ to XYZW, and General Availability is targeted toward the end of October 2026.
15 Sep
BlackPanther2 quadruped runs at 13.2 m/s on a treadmill and 11.65 m/s outdoors, authors report (paper · 15 minute read)
A refined actuator model that captures high-speed voltage coupling and magnetic saturation reduces the sim-to-real gap for fast quadruped running, while a reinforcement learning framework with a two-stage curriculum and adaptive command scheduling keeps training stable. On the 36.5 kg BlackPanther2, the authors report speeds of 13.2 m/s on a treadmill and 11.65 m/s outdoors, which they describe as a world record for quadrupedal robot locomotion.
9 Sep
MuJoCo 3.13 adds a discrete integrator that keeps stiff springs stable (tool · 2 minute read)
MuJoCo 3.13.0 writes the .mjz root file as model.xml, which survives file renaming, and lets site geometries be associated with meshes. A new discrete integrator merges the constraint solve and the implicit velocity update into one operation, bringing joint, tendon and actuator stiffness into the solver's metric. Passive springs and actuator position gains stay stable at timesteps far beyond the explicit stability limit, and Python 3.15 is now supported, GIL and free-threading alike.
7 Sep
Genesis 1.4 exports scenes and trajectories for bit-exact replay (tool · 3 minute read)
Genesis v1.4.0 can export a scene and a complete trajectory as a standalone archive that replays bit-exactly on any machine, aimed squarely at making bug reports reproducible. Only the rigid solver is supported so far, and the static description of entities is now separated from the runtime getters. The breaking changes cover external wrenches applied at any point on a link and morph pose offsets in the velocity and acceleration getters, alongside a long list of asset-parsing fixes.
2 Sep
Atlas: A World Model for Spatial Intelligence (10 minute read)
World Labs has introduced Atlas, a multimodal autoregressive diffusion transformer pretrained from scratch on text, images, video and 3D. All inputs share one spatial context, from which the model generates what comes next while staying consistent in 3D with everything it has already seen. It covers world generation, reconstruction and simulation, including camera-controlled generation from one or more images, and World Labs says performance keeps improving as training compute grows.
27 Aug
Microduck (2 minute read)
Microduck is a 25 cm open-source biped that owners train themselves with reinforcement learning.
27 Aug
How to Train a Cross-Embodiment Robot Navigation Policy with AI Agents (11 minute read)
NVIDIA describes an agent-driven workflow in which a coding agent validates dependencies, prepares assets, runs smoke tests, launches training and compares checkpoints for a navigation policy. Human approval gates control scene acceptance, the smoke test and checkpoint promotion, so the work is not repeated for every robot-scene pair. The tutorial uses Spot as the reference robot across a built-in scene and a SAGE-10K scene, with Omniverse NuRec supporting captured environments.
20 Aug
MuJoCo 3.12 moves MJCF into a single schema and adds a PID actuator (tool · 6 minute read)
MuJoCo 3.12.0 defines the MJCF grammar in a single schema file, generating the parser's grammar table, keyword maps and typed attribute bindings from it. The release also adds a PID actuator and, as a breaking change, drops the custom binary texture format in favour of PNG and KTX. The new PID actuator takes real position and velocity setpoints with optional integral action, anti-windup and slew limiting, subsuming the old plugin with proper activation state.
20 Aug
ADEPT: Accelerating Dexterity via Pre-Training and Post-Training using Reinforcement Learning (paper · 15 minute read)
ADEPT pretrains a dexterous reinforcement-learning policy on generic object reposing and post-trains task policies from it, then transfers them zero-shot from simulation to a 23-DoF Kuka-Allegro and a 29-DoF Flexiv-Sharpa hand with tactile sensors, solving long-horizon tasks at human-level speed.
18 Aug
IG-10K: 20,000 paired human-robot episodes for the Imitator Game benchmark (dataset · 1 minute read)
The IG-10K dataset accompanies The Imitator Game benchmark, with over 20,000 paired human-robot episodes across more than 50 tasks and six domains. It spans four levels of imitation difficulty in real and simulated settings, in LeRobot format.
17 Aug
Tactile Sim2Real without Tactile Simulation via Bottlenecked Latent Reconstruction (paper · 15 minute read)
SBLR trains tactile policies on an easily simulated oracle sensor, a point cloud with fingertip forces, and maps the real sensor's embeddings onto it at run time. On peg insertion and gear meshing with GelSight Mini and DIGIT sensors it reaches 85–97.5% zero-shot success without modelling either sensor.
12 Aug
ZEST turns motion capture, video and animation into robot skills without fine-tuning (3 minute read)
Researchers at the RAI Institute and Boston Dynamics describe ZEST, a reinforcement-learning recipe that turns motion capture, single-camera video and keyframe animation into whole-body skills, trained entirely in simulation and run on hardware without fine-tuning. On Atlas, Unitree's G1 and Spot it produced crawls, cartwheels, breakdancing and a backflip, each policy taking about 10 hours on one NVIDIA L4 GPU; so far it is limited to flat, non-slippery ground.
7 Aug
Genesis 1.3.2 makes rigid-body simulation deterministic on CPU and GPU (tool · 1 minute read)
Genesis v1.3.2 makes rigid-body simulation behave consistently across scene orientations and scales, and improves numerical robustness when the mass matrix is ill-conditioned. Simulation is now fully deterministic on a given machine, on both CPU and GPU. It also adds terrain-height querying, and fixes viewer picking, raycast sensors missing hits, and a crash on delayed sensor reads.
7 Aug
AI agents create virtual playgrounds to help robots get crucial training data (6 minute read)
A system from MIT uses three agents to assemble the objects, walls and overall appearance of a 3D scene. The generated indoor spaces let robots practise skills and try alternative approaches before they are powered on, addressing how slow and costly it is to teach machines physically. The researchers put the remaining bottleneck in content rather than physics: simulator engines have improved, but generating scenes rich and varied enough to match the real world has not.
— Robohubsimulation
3 Aug
Simulated zebrafish and a vision-equipped robotic fish reveal how the body shapes brain circuits (8 minute read)
EPFL's Biorobotics Laboratory used a simulated zebrafish and a vision-equipped robotic fish to examine how the body shapes the brain's control of position-holding against a current.
— Robohubsimulation
3 Aug
Open-DiffLoco: Open-Source Differentiable Learning for Deployable Blind Quadruped Locomotion (paper · 15 minute read)
Open-DiffLoco is an open-source framework that trains blind quadruped locomotion policies with differentiable simulation, running the Short-Horizon Actor-Critic algorithm in MuJoCo XLA. Deployed on a Unitree Go2, the proprioceptive policy tracks omnidirectional velocity commands with under 0.2 m/s of error, runs faster than 1 m/s and withstands lateral pushes, without reference trajectories or complex auxiliary rewards. Training takes 20 to 60 minutes on a single RTX 5080 with under 6 GB of video memory.