Simulation

Autonomous driving is the operation of a road vehicle by a computer system instead of a person. Its six automation levels, its two main technical traditions and its long line of research vehicles define how the field is discussed today.

Rodney Brooks's 1990 paper argued for building artificial intelligence from the ground up, with ongoing physical interaction with the environment as the main constraint on design, rather than through the abstract manipulation of symbols that had dominated the field for roughly thirty years.

A 2019 paper by Francois Chollet that defines intelligence as skill-acquisition efficiency and introduces the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC), a benchmark of grid tasks that assumes no specialised knowledge or language.

A 2020 paper by Mildenhall, Srinivasan, Tancik, Barron, Ramamoorthi and Ng that represents a scene as a neural radiance field: a network mapping 5D coordinates to density and colour, optimized from a sparse set of images with known camera poses.

Isaac GR00T N1 is an open foundation model for humanoid robots that NVIDIA announced on 18 March 2025. It is designed to be post-trained for a specific robot or task, and it pairs a planning model with quick motion control.

A 2025 paper introducing ARC-AGI-2, a benchmark of input-output puzzle tasks built to measure abstract reasoning in frontier AI systems, with human testing as a baseline and a task set designed to give a more granular signal of progress.

A world model is a machine learning system that learns an internal representation of an environment and predicts how it changes in response to actions, letting agents plan inside a learned simulator instead of by trial and error.

A checkers program built by Arthur Samuel at IBM, begun in 1949 and published in 1959, that learned by memorising positions, playing itself and scoring board positions, and played at a respectable amateur level.

SHRDLU was an early natural-language program built by Terry Winograd at MIT in 1968–1970 that conversed in English about a small blocks world, executing commands, answering questions and learning names — a landmark demo whose success fed an optimism later systems could not sustain.

NVIDIA Research is the research arm of the chipmaker NVIDIA, founded in 2006 with more than 200 scientists. It leads work on AI, self-driving cars, high-performance computing and graphics, and it builds the company's open Nemotron language models.

A DeepMind reinforcement-learning agent that combined Q-learning with a convolutional neural network to play Atari 2600 games straight from raw pixels, reaching human-level performance on many titles without being told the rules.

A 2017 arXiv paper, later published in Science, reporting that a single self-play reinforcement learning algorithm, AlphaZero, mastered chess, shogi and Go and beat strong specialised programs in each.

OpenAI Five was a team of five reinforcement-learning bots that played the video game Dota 2; in April 2019 it beat OG, the reigning world champions, in a best-of-three series.

AlphaStar is a DeepMind system that plays StarCraft II. In 2019 it reached Grandmaster level with all three races, ranking above 99.8% of active players on Battle.net.

MuZero is a DeepMind reinforcement-learning algorithm that learns a model of its environment and plans inside that model, mastering Atari, Go, chess and shogi without being given the rules of those games.

A 2022 Nature paper by Degrave, Felici and colleagues showing that a deep reinforcement learning controller can learn on its own to command all of a tokamak's magnetic control coils, producing and holding a range of plasma shapes.

GraphCast is a graph neural network trained on four decades of reanalysis data that produces 10-day global weather forecasts at 0.25 degree resolution in under a minute, outperforming the leading operational deterministic systems on most verification targets.

Pangu-Weather is a three-dimensional deep-learning model for medium-range global weather forecasting, published in Nature in 2023; on reanalysis data it produced stronger forecasts than ECMWF's operational system across all tested variables.

Aurora is a foundation model for the Earth system, trained on more than a million hours of geophysical data. It outperforms operational forecasts for weather, air quality, ocean waves and tropical cyclone tracks at far lower computational cost.

Genie 3 is Google DeepMind's general-purpose world model, announced on 5 August 2025. It turns text prompts into interactive 720p environments that can be navigated in real time at 24 frames per second, and was released as a limited research preview.

Visual odometry lets a rover measure how far it actually moved by tracking features in camera images taken before and after a short drive, instead of trusting wheel turns. NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers were the first to demonstrate it.

The RoboCup Federation runs an international robot-soccer initiative and competition whose stated aim is to develop robotic players able to beat a human World Cup champion team.

A four-wheeled planetary rover prototype built at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute with NASA funding, Nomad tested autonomous driving and rock analysis in Antarctica, hunting meteorites on the ice without step-by-step human control.

A multi-agent system is a computing system made of several interacting intelligent agents that coordinate to solve problems too hard for a single agent. Recent frameworks built on large language models let such agents talk to each other.

AutoNav is the autonomous driving software used by NASA's Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers. It combines stereo vision, GESTALT terrain assessment, Visual Odometry, and Field D* path planning to let rovers choose and drive safe paths without step-by-step direction from Earth.

Sim-to-real transfer is the practice of training robot policies in simulation and then adapting them to physical robots, using synthetic data to supplement costly real-world demonstrations.

Embodied AI is the study of agents that learn by interacting with an environment, using egocentric perception, rather than only from datasets curated from the internet. Simulators serve as virtual testbeds where such agents are trained and evaluated.

MuZero is a DeepMind reinforcement-learning algorithm that pairs tree-based search with a learned model. It reached superhuman play in Atari, Go, chess and shogi without being given the environment's rules.

GraphCast is a Google DeepMind machine-learning model that makes global weather forecasts up to 10 days ahead, producing a 10-day forecast in under a minute on a single TPU and outperforming ECMWF's HRES on most tested variables.

A Google DeepMind generative world model with 11 billion parameters that turns text, images or sketches into controllable virtual worlds, described as the first generative interactive environment trained on unlabelled internet videos without action labels.

Octo is an open-source generalist robot policy: a transformer-based diffusion model trained on 800,000 robot trajectories that can drive a range of robots out of the box and be fine-tuned to new setups.

Genie 2 is a foundation world model from Google DeepMind, announced on 4 December 2024, that turns a single prompt image into a playable 3D environment that a person or an AI agent can explore with keyboard and mouse controls.

NVIDIA Cosmos is a platform of world foundation models that generate physics-based video to train robots and autonomous vehicles, released as open-weight models in January 2025.

Skild Brain is Skild AI's general-purpose foundation model for robots, trained in a universe of 100,000 different machines and meant to be fitted to existing hardware rather than built for one task.

HunyuanWorld 1.0 is Tencent's open-source model for generating explorable, mesh-exportable 3D worlds from text or images. Released in July 2025, it was followed by a series of lighter and faster versions.

GWM-1 is Runway's first general world model: an autoregressive system that generates 720p video frame by frame in real time and can be steered with camera pose, robot commands or audio.

Soccer Server is a software simulator of soccer, begun by Itsuki Noda as a platform for multi-agent systems research, which later became the official soccer server of RoboCup.

Karol Hausman is a roboticist working on robot learning, sim-to-real transfer and embodied AI. He was a senior research scientist at Google Brain and Google DeepMind, is an adjunct professor at Stanford, and co-founded Physical Intelligence.

NVIDIA's robotics development platform for simulation, training, perception, and deployment.