NVIDIA today announced NVIDIA Omniverse Cloud Sensor RTX™, a set of microservices designed to enable physically accurate sensor simulation, aiming to accelerate the development of fully autonomous machines. Sensors, a growing multibillion-dollar industry, are crucial for providing autonomous vehicles, humanoids, industrial manipulators, mobile robots, and smart spaces with the data needed to comprehend the physical world and make informed decisions.

With NVIDIA Omniverse Cloud Sensor RTX, developers can test sensor perception and associated AI software at scale in realistic virtual environments before real-world deployment. This approach enhances safety while saving time and costs.

“Developing safe and reliable autonomous machines powered by generative physical AI requires training and testing in physically based virtual worlds,” said Rev Lebaredian, vice president of Omniverse and simulation technology at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA Omniverse Cloud Sensor RTX microservices will enable developers to easily build large-scale digital twins of factories, cities and even Earth — helping accelerate the next wave of AI.”

Built on the OpenUSD framework and powered by NVIDIA RTX™ ray-tracing and neural-rendering technologies, Omniverse Cloud Sensor RTX accelerates the creation of simulated environments by combining real-world data from videos, cameras, radar, and lidar with synthetic data. The microservices can simulate a broad range of activities even in scenarios with limited real-world data.

The announcement coincides with NVIDIA’s first-place win at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference’s Autonomous Grand Challenge for End-to-End Driving at Scale. NVIDIA researchers’ winning workflow can be replicated in high-fidelity simulated environments using Omniverse Cloud Sensor RTX, allowing autonomous vehicle (AV) simulation developers to test self-driving scenarios in accurate environments before real-world deployment.

Foretellix and MathWorks are among the first software developers provided access to Omniverse Cloud Sensor RTX for AV development. The microservices will also enable sensor manufacturers to validate and integrate digital twins of their sensors in virtual environments, reducing physical prototyping time.

Early access to Omniverse Cloud Sensor RTX is available for sign-up now, with general availability expected later this year.