This National Robotics Week, running through April 12, NVIDIA is highlighting the pioneering technologies that are shaping the future of intelligent machines and driving progress across manufacturing, healthcare, logistics and more.

Check back here throughout the week to learn the latest on physical AI, which enables machines to perceive, plan and act with greater autonomy and intelligence in real-world environments.

Advancements in robotics simulation and robot learning are driving this fundamental shift in the industry. Plus, the emergence of world foundation models is accelerating the evolution of AI-enabled robots capable of adapting to dynamic and complex scenarios.

For example, by providing robot foundation models like NVIDIA GR00T N1, frameworks such as NVIDIA Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab for robot simulation and training, and synthetic data generation pipelines to help train robots for diverse tasks, the NVIDIA Isaac and GR00T platforms are empowering researchers and developers to push the boundaries of robotics.

Read on all week to dive into the latest research and resources that will equip robotics developers to spur innovation across industries.

Advancing Robotics: IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Honors Emerging Innovators 🔗

The IEEE Robotics and Automation Society in March announced the recipients of its 2025 Early Academic Career Award, recognizing outstanding contributions to the fields of robotics and automation.

This year’s honorees — including NVIDIA’s Shuran Song, Abhishek Gupta and Yuke Zhu — are pioneering advancements in scalable robot learning, real-world reinforcement learning and embodied AI. Their work is shaping the next generation of intelligent systems, driving innovation that impacts both research and real-world applications.

Learn more about the award winners:

• Shuran Song, principal research scientist at NVIDIA, was recognized for her contributions to scalable robot learning. Notable recent papers include:
  • Cosmos-Reason1: From Physical Common Sense to Embodied Reasoning
  • Unified Video Action Model
  • RoboPanoptes: The All-Seeing Robot With Whole-Body Dexterity

• Abhishek Gupta, visiting professor at NVIDIA, was honored for his pioneering work in real-world robotic reinforcement learning. Notable recent papers include:
  • SRSA: Skill Retrieval and Adaptation for Robotic Assembly Tasks
  • HAMSTER: Hierarchical Action Models for Open-World Robot Manipulation
  • Rapidly Adapting Policies to the Real World via Simulation-Guided Fine-Tuning

• Yuke Zhu, principal research scientist at NVIDIA, was awarded for his contributions to embodied AI and widely used open-source software platforms. Notable recent papers include:
  • GR00T N1: An Open Foundation Model for Generalist Humanoid Robots
  • Sim-to-Real Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Based Dexterous Manipulation on Humanoids
  • ASAP: Aligning Simulation and Real-World Physics for Learning Agile Humanoid Whole-Body Skills

These researchers will be recognized at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation in May.

Stay up to date on NVIDIA’s leading robotics research through the Robotics Research and Development Digest (R2D2) tech blog series, subscribing to this newsletter and following NVIDIA Robotics on YouTube, Discord and developer forums.