Isaac Lab: A GPU-Accelerated Simulation Framework for Multi-Modal Robot Learning

We present Isaac Lab, the natural successor to Isaac Gym, which extends the paradigm of GPU-native robotics simulation into the era of large-scale multi-modal learning. Isaac Lab combines high-fidelity GPU parallel physics, photorealistic rendering, and a modular, composable architecture for designing environments and training robot policies. Beyond physics and rendering, the framework integrates actuator models, multi-frequency sensor simulation, data collection pipelines, and domain randomization tools, unifying best practices for reinforcement and imitation learning at scale within a single extensible platform. We highlight its application to a diverse set of challenges, including whole-body control, cross-embodiment mobility, contact-rich and dexterous manipulation, and the integration of human demonstrations for skill acquisition. Finally, we discuss upcoming integration with the differentiable, GPU-accelerated Newton physics engine, which promises new opportunities for scalable, data-efficient, and gradient-based approaches to robot learning. We believe Isaac Lab's combination of advanced simulation capabilities, rich sensing, and data-center scale execution will help unlock the next generation of breakthroughs in robotics research.

SimAvatar: Simulation-Ready Avatars with Layered Hair and Clothing

We introduce SimAvatar, a framework designed to generate simulation-ready clothed 3D human avatars from a text prompt. Current text-driven human avatar generation methods either model hair, clothing, and the human body using a unified geometry or produce hair and garments that are not easily adaptable for simulation within existing simulation pipelines. The primary challenge lies in representing the hair and garment geometry in a way that allows leveraging established prior knowledge from foundational image diffusion models (e.g., Stable Diffusion) while being simulation-ready using either physics or neural simulators. To address this task, we propose a two-stage framework that combines the flexibility of 3D Gaussians with simulation-ready hair strands and garment meshes. Specifically, we first employ three text-conditioned 3D generative models to generate garment mesh, body shape and hair strands from the given text prompt. To leverage prior knowledge from foundational diffusion models, we attach 3D Gaussians to the body mesh, garment mesh, as well as hair strands and learn the avatar appearance through optimization. To drive the avatar given a pose sequence, we first apply physics simulators onto the garment meshes and hair strands. We then transfer the motion onto 3D Gaussians through carefully designed mechanisms for each body part. As a result, our synthesized avatars have vivid texture and realistic dynamic motion. To the best of our knowledge, our method is the first to produce highly realistic, fully simulation-ready 3D avatars, surpassing the capabilities of current approaches.

Neurally Integrated Finite Elements for Differentiable Elasticity on Evolving Domains

We present an elastic simulator for domains defined as evolving implicit functions, which is efficient, robust, and differentiable with respect to both shape and material. This simulator is motivated by applications in 3D reconstruction: it is increasingly effective to recover geometry from observed images as implicit functions, but physical applications require accurately simulating and optimizing-for the behavior of such shapes under deformation, which has remained challenging. Our key technical innovation is to train a small neural network to fit quadrature points for robust numerical integration on implicit grid cells. When coupled with a Mixed Finite Element formulation, this yields a smooth, fully differentiable simulation model connecting the evolution of the underlying implicit surface to its elastic response. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on forward simulation of implicits, direct simulation of 3D shapes during editing, and novel physics-based shape and topology optimizations in conjunction with differentiable rendering.