NVIDIA launches Newton physics engine and GR00T AI at CoRL 2025 - The Robot Report

NVIDIA has introduced several advancements to accelerate robotics research, unveiling the beta release of Newton, an open-source, GPU-accelerated physics engine managed by the Linux Foundation. Developed collaboratively with Google DeepMind and Disney Research, Newton is built on NVIDIA’s Warp and OpenUSD frameworks and is designed to simulate physical AI bodies. Alongside Newton, NVIDIA announced the latest version of the Isaac GR00T N1.6 robot foundation model, soon to be available on Hugging Face. This model integrates Cosmos Reason, an open, customizable vision language model (VLM) that enables robots to convert vague instructions into detailed plans by leveraging prior knowledge, common sense, and physics, thus enhancing robots’ ability to reason, adapt, and generalize across tasks. At the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2025 in Seoul, NVIDIA highlighted Cosmos Reason’s role in enabling robots to handle ambiguous or novel instructions through multi-step inference and AI reasoning, akin to how language models process text. This capability is