How Jaiveer Singh Is Helping Robots - and Developers - Move Faster

Built on the open source ROS 2 framework, Isaac ROS brings CUDA-accelerated libraries and AI models to developers building autonomous mobile robots, manipulation systems and humanoids. "My goal is to make sure everyone feels like they are a part of the robotics future," Singh said. For Singh, that future began in middle school, building with LEGO Mindstorms, a popular line of programmable robotics kits.

After excelling in robotics competitions throughout high school, he studied electrical engineering, computer science and business at the University of California, Berkeley, before joining NVIDIA full time after an internship with the robotics team. In a satisfying turn, the work he now leads began as his intern project. "We wanted to see what would happen if we just released some software as open source that uses the NVIDIA Jetson platform and NVIDIA CUDA libraries for robotics.

Would there be any value there? "And the answer was, of course, yes, because developers always want to be able to unlock the full power of their GPUs. The Building Blocks of a Robotics Revolution Physical AI has long been a field of extraordinary imagination and stubborn, physics-bound realities.

A clip of a robot dancing or executing complex balletics can travel the internet in hours. Building a system that works repeatedly, across sensors, platforms, factories and labs, is slower business. For Singh and the Isaac ROS team, the next era of robotics relies on a full stack: simulation, training, accelerated computing, AI models, middleware and edge deployment.

Isaac ROS supports manipulation, mobility and humanoids. It gives developers packages for perception, object detection, mapping, collision detection and motion planning, and it can run on workstations, NVIDIA DGX Spark personal AI supercomputers as well as NVIDIA Jetson edge systems. "Compared with the original Isaac SDK, Isaac ROS is completely modular," Singh said.

"We ship the software like a bunch of LEGO bricks - you get to assemble them however you want, and you can easily combine our packages with existing ROS code written by you or others in the global robotics community. " NVIDIA is making it easier for many robot builders to move faster, Singh said, and to do so on a foundation they can inspect, adapt and trust. "The main reason open source is valuable is because it gives people confidence that they can build upon this stack at this very initial stage," Singh said.

"Because the entire landscape can shift so rapidly, developers need the confidence that this platform is still going to be there to modify and improve two or three years into the future. " That confidence matters because robotics is changing quickly. Humanoid robots, in particular, have moved from science fiction to an active engineering frontier.