Research @NVIDIA | cuRobo Lead | views my own

San Francisco, CA
Joined October 2018
cuRobo is now open source under Apache 2.0. cuRoboV2 adds <1 ms GPU-native TSDF/ESDF semantic mapping, whole-body IK/MPC and trajectory optimization for humanoids, ~50 ms torque-limited planning. Report: arxiv.org/abs/2603.05493 Code: nvlabs.github.io/curobo
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cuda.core greatly simplifies integrating kernels with pytorch. We did this for curobo and installation went from 10 minutes to a few seconds. See here for an example: github.com/NVlabs/curobo/blo…
Major ecosystem libraries like PyTorch and CuPy now build on the shared cuda.core foundation, reducing version conflicts and interop bugs for developers. With CUDA 13.3, @nvidia released CUDA Python 1.0, the libraries and tools that give you the full CUDA platform from Python. Using standard CUDA context, devices, streams, and memory are shared with the rest of the Python GPU ecosystem, so your own kernels can run against CuPy arrays or PyTorch tensors without copying data. Read the full blog post: bit.ly/4hcSu2C
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Balakumar Sundaralingam retweeted
We are giving out $500k and free YAM arms to academic teams to design dexterous manipulation benchmarks and run real-world evaluations. General-purpose robots could soon be in homes and data centers. Society should know what robots can do before they get there.
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A big update in design from the last version. This looks so much closer to a home manipulation system.
$1,688 humanoid limited second batch shipping this fall. What would you build with it?
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Balakumar Sundaralingam retweeted
a product can be a robot but a robot isn’t necessarily a product in time people will understand
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Congrats! Truly autonomous robot that cleans messy homes!
Replying to @maticrobots
@maticrobots shipped its 10,000th robot this week. 🤖 Back in 2018, there was no product - just a small team, a lot of ideas, and an unreasonable amount of optimism. The photos below are from those early days: prototypes, experiments, customer interviews, design reviews, and plenty of things that never made it into the final product. We first started shipping in November 2024. Huge credit to the Engineering and Production teams that made the 10K bots happen! Great engineering gets you to the first unit. Great teams get you to the first 10,000! Still a lot more to be done. 🚀
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Open Source Grasp Generation for any gripper, any object. You can pair it with cuRoboV2 & Newton for large scale grasp trajectory generation. Try it out here: github.com/NVlabs/GraspGenX/…
Replying to @nvidia
@NVIDIA is working on one of the hardest problems in Physical AI so you don’t have to: generalist robotic pick-and-place. We are excited to introduce GraspGenX at #CVPR2026—a foundation model for robotic grasping that works out of the box for unknown robots, novel objects, and unseen environments. Unlike Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models or dedicated grasp networks that require expensive, embodiment-specific training, GraspGenX is cross-embodiment and works zero-shot. You simply pass a "robot prompt" alongside an image of the object to generate actions. 🚀 Key Highlights: 1) Scaling: Trained on over 2 Billion 6-DoF grasp rollouts entirely in physics simulation—a dataset size practically impossible to collect via real-world teleoperation. 2) Zero-Shot Transfer: Works out of the box for several common robot grippers widely used across the research community and industry. 3) Built for the Agentic Era: Features native MCP support, client-server architecture, and skills.md, allowing seamless integration into LLM/Agentic robotics workflows. 4) Full Pipeline Integration: Pair it with other open foundation models (like SAM3) and advanced motion solvers like cuRoboV2 for full deployment in entirely unknown environments. If you are currently executing pick-and-place with a VLA or WAM, you can use GraspGenX to generate sim-verified trajectory data and inject it into your pipeline. No need to waste precious real-world engineering hours on data collection for standard manipulation tasks. 🌐Website: graspgenx.github.io/ 💻Code: github.com/NVlabs/GraspGenX 📄Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2606.00998 📍CVPR Booth: Poster 619 on Jun 6 1:45 session at ExHall F This work was led by the incredible @BeiningH (Princeton), in collaboration with a phenomenal team at NVIDIA: @erwincoumans, @yu_wei_chao, @balakumar_, @clembow, and Stan Birchfield #CVPR2026
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Balakumar Sundaralingam retweeted
Let's meet and chat at #CVPR! Come by our poster or schedule a coffee chat🙌 Fri afternoon: - Fast-FoundationStereo: nvlabs.github.io/Fast-Founda… - CARI4D: nvlabs.github.io/CARI4D/ (w/ @XianghuiXie ) Sat morning: - Event6D: chohoonhee.github.io/Event6D… (w/ Jae-Young)
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Balakumar Sundaralingam retweeted
Use both: web.mit.edu/dimitrib/www/Les… TO is a Newton step on the Bellman equation. Policies and value functions are "memories" of past solutions; TO should be optimizing over them at inference time. Best of both worlds. Some of the strongest RL methods do this.
Should legged robot use RL or trajectory optimization? #icra2024
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Balakumar Sundaralingam retweeted
New work on vectorizing geometric fabric controllers for RL workflows at scale. DeXtreme: Fabric Guided Policies (FGP). Policies are hard on hardware. We need low-level controllers at deployment, which means we need them during training. FGPs increase hardware lifetime, enable quick iteration on training and deploying policies, and allow us to inject useful inductive bias into the system.
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Our code for CUDA accelerated motion generation is out! Supercharge your workflows with fast batched robotics modules, including kinematics, collision queries, optimization, and motion planning. #PyTorch #Nvidia #Robots
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Balakumar Sundaralingam retweeted
DeXtreme is our new work on scaling sim-to-real for contact-rich manipulation with a vision-based state estimation on a robot hand with the infrastructure we have been developing with Isaac Gym over the past one year. arxiv.org/abs/2210.13702 dextreme.org/
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Balakumar Sundaralingam retweeted
I'm excited to share our #RSS2022 workshop paper: Neural Motion Fields: Encoding Grasp Trajectories as Implicit Value Functions. w/ @Adithya_Murali_ , @balakumar_ , Wei Yang, @animesh_garg, and Dieter Fox at @nvidia. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2206.14854 Video: youtu.be/B-pEhT1pi-Q
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Balakumar Sundaralingam retweeted
Factory: Fast Contact for Robotic Assembly, our recent work, is a set of simulation methods & robot learning tools for contact-rich interactions for robotic assembly. It will be presented at RSS next month. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2205.03532 Website: sites.google.com/nvidia.com/…
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Balakumar Sundaralingam retweeted
Update on Robotic Conferences due to Coronavirus: RSS -> virtual conference WAFR -> postponed by one year (to June 2021) ICRA -> decision on April 6th (virtual vs. postpone to end of 2020) IROS -> as planned (Oct 2020) Humanoids -> as planned (Dez 2020)
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Balakumar Sundaralingam retweeted
Spent the last two days crisscrossing Mumbai for meetings. All those autonomous miles in Chandler, Arizona are easily going to generalize for AV roll outs here. Yeah, right.
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Balakumar Sundaralingam retweeted
I saw this robotics scientist working today. Commenting his code. Writing unit tests. Testing in simulation first. Operating the robot with his hand on the e-stop, observing carefully. Like a psychopath.
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Dexterous hand teleop using RGBD cameras, now possible!
We are excited to release our work on DexPilot, a markerless, glove-free and vision based teleoperation of dexterous robot hand-arm system pdf is here github.com/ankurhanda/dexpil… link to more videos sites.google.com/view/dex-pi… youtu.be/qGE-deYfb8I
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