Description
In November 2021, NVIDIA announced the NVIDIA Omniverse Replicator, data generation engine that produces synthetic data for training deep neural networks based on physical simulations in photorealistic, physically-accurate virtual environments. NVIDIA also introduced two replicator applications for generating simulated data. The Omniverse Replicator, coupled with developer access to the DRIVE Sim and Isaac Sim virtual worlds, all undergirded with and supported by NVIDIA’s increasingly expansive support technologies for robotics development, are critical enablers for robotics development going forward.

The first, NVIDIA DRIVE Sim, is a virtual world for accommodating autonomous vehicles digital twins. The second application, NVIDIA Isaac Sim, supports virtual robotic manipulators. NVIDIA representatives expect 3rd party developers to build additional domain-specific data-generation engines using the Omniverse Replicator engine.

 

Analysis
Machine learning is a powerful enabler when developing software for a range of autonomous systems types including robots, drone and self-driving vehicles. Unfortunately, the process of collecting, labeling and managing the large datasets used for machine learning model training is costly, laborious and can be error prone, with the resulting data often incomplete or inappropriate for the application at hand. The use of simulated data addresses these challenges, but low-quality simulations often result in physical systems performing poorly in the real world.

With the Omniverse Replicator, and the DRIVE Sim and Isaac Sim introductions, NVIDIA is addressing the machine learning data challenge. As its name suggests, the Omniverse Replicator is powered by NVIDIA Omniverse platform, a powerful, well featured set of simulation technologies including GPU-accelerated PhysX 5 physics engine, real-time ray/path tracing for high levels of photorealism, and a material definition language for rendering physical objects.

The Omniverse Replicator, coupled with developer access to the DRIVE Sim and Isaac Sim virtual worlds (and the potential for additional virtual environments), all undergirded with and supported by NVIDIA’s increasingly expansive support technologies for robotics development, are critical enablers for robotics development going forward. – Dan Kara